Curiosity Passes Yet Another Milestone, Firing its Laser for 100,000th Time

NASA announced Thursday that NASA's Curiosity Mars rover passed an important milestone late October when the probe shot its 100,000th laser, used to uncover what chemical elements are present in the rocks and soil it encounters.

The shot came as part of an effort to investigate 10 locations on a rock called Ithaca. The Chemistry and Camera instrument (ChemCam) uses the infrared laser to excite material into a glowing, ionized gas known as plasma. Every pulse delivers more than 1 million watts of power for roughly five one-millionths of a second. 

As of the beginning of December, ChemCam had fired its laser more than 102,000 times at more than 400 targets, each shot producing a spectrum of data returned to Earth. 

"Passing 100,000 laser shots is terribly exciting and is providing a remarkable set of chemical data for Mars," said ChemCam co-investigator Horton Newsom of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Currently, an international team of scientists and students are sifting through the information gathered by ChemCam in hopes of better understand the variety of materials inside Mars' Gale Crater, as well as the processes that formed them.

"These materials include dust, wind-blown soil, water-lain sediments derived from the crater rim, veins of sulfates and igneous rocks that may be ejecta from other parts of Mars," Newsom said.

ChemCam is one of 10 instruments found on Curiosity. The rover arrived at the Red Planet in August 2012, the entire mission costing an estimated $2.5 billion, including $1.8 billion for development and science investigations, and additional amounts for launch and operations, according to the space agency.

The probe is currently on its way to a formation known as Mount Sharp, a 3.5-mile high landmass located in the middle of the 96-mile wide Gale Crater.

Researchers suspect the mount was formed by winds carrying dust and sand across the Red Planet. If true, the site could serve as a windo into the planet's geologic history.