France on Mars aboard NASA’s Perseverance Rover

News

16 March 2020

NASA’s next Mars rover has a new name: “Perseverance”. This name is reminiscent of its wheeled predecessors: Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. Long live Perseverance, which will be launched this summer from Cape Canaveral towards the red planet! “Perseverance” has a piercing eye, the laser of the SuperCam instrument that was specially built by the United States and France to study the geology of the soil and rocks of Mars. The instrument will help scientists in their search for early, fossilized signs of microbial life on the Red Planet. SuperCam’s powerful laser sprays very small amounts of rock from a distance, emitting a spark whose light is analyzed. The instrument thus provides essential information on the composition of Martian rocks.

SuperCam is located at the top of the @NASAPersevere mast. Consisting of 5 sub-instruments developed by the @LosAlamosNatLab and a consortium of laboratories led by the @IRAP_France, it will be operated alternately from the @CNES control center.

Further Resources

IRAP Contact

  • Sylvestre Maurice, sylvestre.maurice@irap.omp.eu

More news

ESO signs agreement for MOSAIC instrument on the ELT

Today, ESO has signed an agreement with a large international consortium for the design and construction of the Multi-Object Spectrograph (MOSAIC), an instrument for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Able […]

Electric discharges detected on Mars for the first time

Electric discharges have for the first time been recorded within the storms and whirlwinds of dust – known as dust devils – that sweep across the surface of Mars. Captured […]

MACIV nodes: an exceptional seismological network on the volcanoes of the Massif Central

As part of the MACIV project, funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR), a team of scientists deployed the largest mobile seismological network ever installed by a university team […]

Search