The Mars Curiosity Rover has an impressive suite of instruments, but none incite as much excitement as ChemCam, a laser/camera combo that vaporizes rocks and analyzes their components. ChemCam is firing more than it ever has before, and Nina Lanza, a staff scientist on its team, is helping make some pretty remarkable discoveries with it. On this episode, Nina tells us about a high concentration of manganese recently uncovered that tells us a lot about Mars’ past, and suggests that it might have been complete with a lot more oxygen than we initially thought.
Links
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2016/June/06.27-chemcam-findings.php" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Press Release for Nina Lanza’s paper</a></li>
<li><a href="https://twitter.com/marsninja" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nina’s Twitter Account</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.msl-chemcam.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ChemCam’s website</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEZ5dEi4oPo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Video showing ChemCam in action</a></li>
<li><a href="http://mars.nasa.gov/msl/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Curiosity’s website</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.lanl.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Los Alamos National Lab</a></li>
</ul>
WeMartians Theme Song is “RetroFuture” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

12 – Mission to sMars (feat. the crew of HI-SEAS IV)

The WeMartians Podcast delves into all aspects of the exploration of Mars, including robotic/human spacecraft and rocket engineering, planetary science, astronomy and other upcoming technology. Our episodes are research-supported and feature topical audio clips and special guests.