Happy Birthday Perseverance, one year already and the consecration of the millionth laser shot on Mars

News

18 February 2022

Just one year ago, on the evening of February 18, 2021, the Perseverance rover of the Mars2020 mission landed in the Jezero crater on Mars. On board, the Franco-American SuperCam instrument is a much-improved version of the ChemCam instrument that has been operating on Mars since August 2012 aboard the Curiosity rover of NASA’s MSL mission. These instruments were developed jointly by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and a consortium of French laboratories under the scientific direction of IRAP (CNRS / CNES / Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier) – Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie. Together, SuperCam and ChemCam have exceeded one million laser shots on Mars.

This image taken by one the hazard cameras aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover on Aug. 6, 2021, shows the hole drilled in what the rover’s science team calls a “paver rock” in preparation for the mission’s first attempt to collect a sample from Mars. Crédits : NASA/JPL-Caltech

IRAP Contacts

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