November 26, 2012

Image Caption: Rocknest 3 relayed by Mars Express. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

The European Space Agencys Mars Express has relayed scientific data from NASAs Curiosity rover for the first time.

The data from Curiosity included detailed images of Rocknest 3 taken by the rovers ChemCam Remote Micro-Imager camera.

ChemCam consists of the camera along with a Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectrometer, which fires a laser at targets and analyzes the chemical composition of vaporized material.

Curiosity transmitted scientific data up to the ESA satellite for 15 minutes, and a few hours later Mars Express pointed its high-gain antenna toward Earth and began downlinking the information to the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.

The data was then immediately made available to NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, helping them prove that Curiosity was able to talk with ESAs satellite as well.

The first image was taken before a series of five ChemCam laser blasts, while the second image was taken after. The images were first taken early in the morning on October 6.

The quality of these images from ChemCam is outstanding, and the mosaic image of the spectrometer analyses has been essential for scientific interpretation of the data, said Sylvestre Maurice, Deputy Principal Investigator for ChemCam at Frances Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP).

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Mars Express Relays Rocky Images From Curiosity Rover