a year that the Supercam, piloted from Toulouse, explores the planet Mars
It is the eye of Perseverance, the Supercam, a French instrument has been on the planet Mars for 1 year now. A symbolic course and already many nuggets mentioned.
On the evening of Thursday February 18, 2021, the Perseverance rover, with seven instruments on board, including the Supercam, landed on the planet Mars, after 7 months of travel. The vehicle arrived in the Jezero crater, a basin 45 kilometers in diameter, which a river filled with liquid water 3.5 billion years ago.
Since February 18, 2021, the NASA rover has been exploring the red planet in search of traces of life.
The Martian soil is a land of all dangers, full of pebbles, large dunes, explains Pernelle Bernardi, CNRS engineer in charge of the Franco-American Supercam instrument. The camera has a very high definition. It can take images from a great distance with very good resolutions. A veritable “Swiss army knife” of the mission, Supercam brings together five measurement techniques intended to study the geology of Mars and helps in the selection of samples to be collected by the rover.
Supercam counts 62,000 green shots, provides information on mineralogy, and as many infrared shots. He has already made a decisive contribution in obtaining the first scientific results of the Mars 2020 mission proving the existence of a lake at the location of the Jezero crater.
From its earliest days on Mars, the Supercam was able to record sound and transmit it to scientists. To pay Sylvestre Maurice, scientific co-director of Supercamat CNES and CNRS in Toulouse, it was a great first:
It was one of the great discoveries of the year. No one had ever heard of Mars!
Sylvestre Maurice, scientific co-manager of Supercam
Every day, with his team, he strips the last deliveries of the robot.
In twelve months, we defined a harvest of data on mineralogy, atmosphere, weather and tens of thousands of images.
Sylvestre Maurice, scientific co-manager of Supercam
Piloting the vehicle is shared alternately and jointly every other week between Cnes, the French space agency in Toulouse, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, LANL in the United States.
Every day, between 100 and 200 people find themselves at the helm.
The Perseverance rover covered four kilometres, including 500 meters last weekend, a record! If the robot is going so slowly, it is because the objective of the mission is to take around forty well-chosen samples over six years. 7 have already been collected. Another mission will bring them back to Earth by the 2030s.