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

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