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…