Curiosity to Fire Laser to Examine Martian Rock

The successful delivery of photos of the Mars by Rover Curiosity has lead NASA to move on their next step and have revealed their plans for Curiosity's next moves.

"The successful delivery of these photos means we can begin efforts in earnest for the first images of Mars rocks by the ChemCam instrument and the first use of the instrument's laser," Roger Wiens, Principal Investigator of the ChemCam Team, said.

"We anticipate these next steps over the weekend," he said.

Currently, The NASA Mars rover Curiosity is preparing for its first laser target practice - zapping a Martian rock 10 feet (3 meters) away on Saturday night.

"Rock N-165 looks like your typical Mars rock, about three inches (seven centimeters) wide and it's about 10 feet away," Wiens said.

"We are going to hit it with 14 millijoules of energy 30 times in 10 seconds. It is not only going to be an excellent test of our system, but it should be pretty cool too," he said.

"There's a high-power laser that briefly projects several megawatts onto a pinhead-size spot on the surface of Mars," lead instrument scientist Roger Wiens said. "It creates plasma, or a little ball of flame or spark."

"Probably we'll do a month worth of science there, maybe a little bit more," lead mission scientist John Grotzinger told reporters during a conference call. "Sometime toward the end of the calendar year, roughly, I would guess then we would turn our sights toward the trek to Mount Sharp."

As the rover is set to start exploring the Mars surface, Grotzinger is of the opinion that they will not have to travel to far as they've had the best possible landing space. 

"We won't have to travel far for excitement," says Grotzinger. "We landed in the best possible place within the landing ellipse - the bottom of an alluvial fan."

Early findings have been quite interesting says Grotzinger. "The alluvial fan indicates that water flowed across the surface, so we'll head downhill to where water might have collected. We'll be looking for minerals like salts that might tell us where water has been. It's kind of like a scavenger hunt with minerals as clues."