NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument to study several rocks around a rocky outcrop called ‘Skinner Ridge’ in the Jezero Crater. This instrument, located on the rover’s robotic arm, can study the chemical makeup of rocks by analyzing how they scatter light.
How does SHERLOC work? The instrument essentially directs a UV laser at its target and then observers how it is absorbed and then emitted. This provides a unique spectral “fingerprint” of different molecules, thus allowing scientists to classify organics and minerals present in a rock and understand the environment in which it formed. Once it captures the rock’s textures, data is then added to those images to produce spatial maps of chemicals on its surface.
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These detections are an exciting example of what SHERLOC can find, and they’re helping us understand how to look for the best samples. We see a set of signals that are consistent with organics in the data from Quartier. That grabbed everyone’s attention,” said Sunanda Sharma, Lead Author from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
