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DOE’s ScienceCinema [3]is now showing “A LANL Scientist’s Dream Takes Off to Zap Rocks on Mars” [4] starring Roger Wiens [5].
At age 9, Roger Wiens and his brother built rockets, a whole fleet of rockets. They also built a telescope that allowed them to draw craters they saw on Mars when it neared close to earth. Little did Roger know that he would be putting a camera on Mars 40 years later. Roger Wiens is now a LANL planetary scientist [6] and the principal investigator of the Mars Science Laboratory [7] mission’s ChemCam [5] team. The ChemCam instrument fires a laser at Martian rocks and looks at the resultant flash to determine the composition. Data obtained from Chemcam is helping to answer the question of about life on Mars. Visit DOE’s ScienceCinema [8]to catch Roger’s excitement along with a team of 40 people at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) [9]and the collabortaion of the French Space Agency IRAP [10] as the Curiosity rover [11] reaches Mars [12].
Read about the intitial ChemCam Rock Laser development [13] in the Energy Citations Database [14] and see more Curiosity R&D in DOE’s Science Showcase [15].