The BBC reported late last night that the Curiosity rover has successfully fired it’s lazer beam as a test to see if the instrument was working.
It’s target was a small stone roughly 2 meters away from the rover pictured below:
The BBC has outlined what happened
ChemCam zapped it with 30 pulses of infrared light during a 10-second period.
Each pulse delivered to a tiny spot more than a million watts of power for about five billionths of a second.
The instrument observed the resulting spark through a telescope; the component colours would have told scientists which atomic elements were present.
Curiosity should start moving towards Mount Sharp very soon.
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