From mission control in Toulouse, France, NASA's Perseverance rover successfully fired its SuperCam instrument's first laser pulses at a nearby Mars rock. This breakthrough enables detailed chemical analysis, marking a key milestone as the rover gears up for its primary science objectives.
At FOCSE—the French Operations Center for Space Exploration at CNES in Toulouse—our expert team remotely commands Perseverance's SuperCam. This advanced mast-mounted instrument, a cornerstone of the mission, is designed to hunt for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.
SuperCam combines a powerful laser with three spectrometers for remote chemical analysis of rocks. It works by firing precise laser pulses that vaporize a thin surface layer, creating a plasma plume whose light is captured and decoded by the spectrometers to reveal elemental makeup.
On the night of March 1 to 2, the team targeted a small pebble named "Máaz"—"Mars" in the Navajo language. The shot was a resounding success: SuperCam confirmed the rock's basaltic composition, a common igneous rock type abundant on both Mars and Earth.
Whether Máaz formed volcanically or as a sedimentary deposit of basaltic grains transported and cemented in Jezero Crater remains under investigation.
SuperCam's onboard microphone recorded the sharp "pops" of laser hits on the rock, along with the whisper of wind in Mars' thin atmosphere. "These recordings have demonstrated that our microphone not only works well, but that we also have a very high quality signal for our scientific studies," said Naomi Murdoch, a key SuperCam team member at CNES Toulouse.
Perseverance's full scientific campaign is just beginning. Next, the rover will scout a safe "aerodrome" for the Ingenuity helicopter's inaugural flight demo. Positioned nearby, Perseverance will image the event—and its microphones may even capture the rotor blades slicing through Martian air.
