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Curiosity fired its frickin’ lazer beam

Posted on August 20, 2012August 22, 2012 by Andi Hamilton

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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