{"id":92,"date":"2012-10-15T11:55:57","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T11:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2012\/10\/15\/monday-15th-october-sol-69\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:28:39","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:28:39","slug":"monday-15th-october-sol-69","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2012\/10\/15\/monday-15th-october-sol-69\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday 15th October Sol 69"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As we are currently static in Rocknest the use of the Mast instruments comes to the fore.&nbsp; In particular, ChemCam is important.&nbsp; ChemCam uses a laser to hit rocks at a distance of metres away.&nbsp; This energy input creates a plasma above the laser spot.&nbsp; The light from this plasma is viewed with a spectrometer and the peaks on the spectra compared to that known for different elements.&nbsp; The laser we use has a wavelength of 1067 nm, which belongs to the near-infrared region of wavelengths.&nbsp; Using only 3 Watt of power, our laser creates 30 mJ laser power per pulse, and it shoots at a rate of 15 Hz.&nbsp; Near-infrared lasers are very common in terrestrial application like metal manufacturing and medical applications.&nbsp; In analytical sciences in terrestrial labs, lasers are used to vaporize rocks and introduce elements of interest into a mass spectrometer.&nbsp; Commercial lasers for that purpose have an energy output in the range of 120 mJ\/ns in the near infrared and operate at a rate of up to 20 Hz.&nbsp; Using ChemCam we can quickly compare spectra from different rocks to see if they have a similar composition.<\/p>\n<p>The image shows the space shuttle Endeavour arriving today at its final destination in a hangar outside the California Science Center.&nbsp; Just like MSL has shown for robotic exploration, Endeavour continues to show the enormous public interest in the human exploration of space.&nbsp; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As we are currently static in Rocknest the use of the Mast instruments comes to the fore.&nbsp; In particular, ChemCam is important.&nbsp; ChemCam uses a laser to hit rocks at a distance of metres away.&nbsp; This energy input creates a plasma above the laser spot.&nbsp; The light from this plasma is viewed with a spectrometer [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":341,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":730,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92\/revisions\/730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}