NASA Mars 2020 Rover News: New ChemCam Successor Can Detect Evidence of Life

By Clarissa Partosa, Christian Post Contributor Wednesday, September 27, 2017

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is currently working on the ChemCam's successor, which will be able to detect the existence of life on Mars.

NASA is preparing for their next expedition that will head towards the red planet in three years with the Mars 2020 Rover, The Optical Society confirmed, by building an enhanced ChemCam successor, the SuperCam.

Unlike the NASA Curiosity rover's ChemCam, the SuperCam will have two different laser modes, which will help the rover identify signs of past life on Mars.

The first laser is a faster version of the Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), which is also used by the ChemCam to atomize, activate, and capture chemical signatures of components.

Meanwhile, the second laser is a new conduction-cooled laser system that allows non-destructive analysis of RAMAN spectroscopy, which can identify carbon-based traces of organic materials.

The SuperCam will have the ability to interchange between the enhanced LIBS mode and RAMAN mode of lasing with the use of two different laser colors that will activate and analyze molecular vibration energies to come up with non-destructive chemical identification.

The second laser color, a 532-nanometer beam produced by a crystal double the 1064 nanometer frequency used in LIBS mode measurement, will be the key to the SuperCam's ability to discover molecular structures evident of past life.

NASA already featured the SuperCam on the Mars 2020 Rover site, claiming that "It can identify the chemical and mineral makeup of targets as small as a pencil point from a distance of more than 20 feet (7 meters)."

Another feature of the SuperCam is that it chooses the types of rocks to examine. The SuperCam focuses mainly on rocks that have been changed by water on Mars from a long time ago.

Aside from finding signs of past life, the SuperCam will be able to identify rocks and soils that have the potential to preserve microbial life on Mars, if there will be any.