Space: Curiosity Says Hello to Mars with a Million Watt Nuclear Laser

Not enough attention has been paid to the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars on August 5, 2012. And there really should, because there's a nuclear powered robot on another fucking planet. Head's up, kids, there's some seriously awesome science going on here.

Let's start off with a bit of basics. Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. Earth and Mars, can be anywhere from 55 to 400 million kilometers apart. I'm sorry, let me say that again: 400 MILLION KILOMETERS. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. The Curiosity Rover, however, traveled a paltry 350 million km. The landing cycle, as Curiosity dropped it's 1 tonne, 2.5 billion dollar ass on the Red Planet like a nuclear powered sack of awesome, became known as the "7 minutes of terror" because of the 14 minute delay of transmission between the third and fourth rocks from the Sun combined with the seven minute decent; NASA scientists had to wait for seven terrifying minutes to find out if Curiosity landed safely, or in a highly expensive pile of rubble.

After spending a few days stretching its arms and testing it's systems, combined with a four day software update, Curiosity is ready to get down to business, and it's first order of business it to interrogate a rock. With a million fucking watt laser. Stop and let that sink in. It's okay, I'll wait. The Chemistry and Camera instrument (hereby known by its far more impressive name, ChemCam) developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory is capable of firing a more than million watt laser in order to figure out the composition of different objects. Over a 10 second period it managed to fire a pulse at the fist-sized Coronation rock 30 times, each pulse applied for five one-billionths of a second each.

"Fucking SCIENCE, bitches!"

The cam part of ChemCam comes into use after the laser has fired. The area of rock hit by the laser becomes a glowing plasma which the camera focuses on using a telescope and analyzes the light given off. Using three spectrometers (one for visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light), ChemCam can determine what elements are contained within the freshly obliterated rock. It's expected that thousands of “targets” will be analyzed in this way over the course of Curiosity’s 24 month mission.

"Fuck you, Johnny 5"

So, if you're interested in finding out more about Curiosity, and you damn well should be, spend some time with our good friend, the Internet. There's a metric shit-tonne of stuff out there about this, and lord knows if you're reading this article, you can find others. Probably with far less colourful language.