Perseverance’s arsenal
Any $2.7-billion rover worth its salt is equipped with the right gear for deciphering every little feature it sees on a world hundreds of millions of miles away. After all, once it gets there, there’s no coming back.
Perseverance hosts a suite of imagers for mapping out the Martian terrain, but also scrutinizing the itsy-bitsy elements contained in Martian rock samples. As reported by Gizmodo in 2021:
[I]t’s easy to forget about the impressive arsenal of imaging technology at Perseverance’s disposal: There’s the chemistry-sensing, laser-shooting SuperCam; the x-ray rock-reader known as PIXL; and the Mastcam-Z imager (which you may remember was taking all those photos of Ingenuity in flight).
But that’s not all. There’s also the WATSON camera on the end of the rover’s robotic arm, which will allow the folks at NASA up-close looks at the rock samples. WATSON is part of SHERLOC (NASA loves an interplanetary Victorian literature reference), which can scrutinize rock for organic compounds and minerals that indicate how the rocks formed.
It was the SHERLOC camera that spotted signals of organic molecules in the rocks in Jezero Crater this week.
