The Mars Curiosity Rover Opens Fire on Mars! | Bill Housley

The Mars Curiosity Rover Opens Fire on Mars!

Curiosity’s first test object, a rock now called “Coronation“, received several blasts of laser fire from the rover today to test its composition.

The laser excites a portion of the rock’s surface to a plasma so that a spectrometer can isolate the atoms that the rock is made of.

Also, the rock has a Twitter presence ( @N165Mars ) where you can read about more events that happen to it. Somebody mentioned in a Tweet that the rock should be glad that they didn’t drill it…

The rock Tweeted back, “There’s a drill!?”

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~ by Bill Housley on August 19, 2012.

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@onlyLindaColyer @neiltyson Laughed myself to a headache! 2 days ago
RT @onlyLindaColyer: @neiltyson If the earth was flat, cats would have pushed everything off it by now. 2 days ago
@BadAstronomer Plus, the writers have been hanging a lantern on the possibility for quite a while. This should have surprised no one. 3 days ago
Yes...we're mostly about space here lately. fb.me/8YU94nnnM 4 days ago
I think former Pres. Obama would find the Tigger metaphore amusing. I wonder which Winnie the Pooh character they... fb.me/1ay2WRafm 4 days ago
Share Space is a non-profit organization that provides free tools for teaching space topics. fb.me/242zSR8GC 5 days ago
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@elonmusk So do the contractors building SLS. They won't fly in 2017 and probably not in 2018, but they get paid anyway. 1 week ago
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