Mars Report: Update on NASA’s Perseverance Rover SuperCam Instrument (June 10, 2021)

Since landing on the Red Planet, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has been hard at work analyzing rocks and soil on the floor of Jezero Crater with the SuperCam instrument. SuperCam features a rock-vaporizing laser, camera, and microphone that can gather data from a distance. This video provides an instrument update by Hemani Kalucha, one of the SuperCam operations team members from Caltech. The laser pits shown are about .009 inches (250 microns) in diameter and spaced 1/8 inch (3 millimeters) apart. Sounds of an Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flight captured by the SuperCam microphone can be heard in the video NASA’s Perseverance Rover Hears Ingenuity Mars Helicopter in Flight. For more information on Perseverance, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/perseverance. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS/LANL/CNES/IRAP