11 – Mad About Manganese (feat. Nina Lanza)

The Mars Curiosity Rover has an impressive suite of instruments, but none incite as much excitement as ChemCam, a laser/camera combo that vaporizes rocks and analyzes their components. ChemCam is firing more than it ever has before, and Nina Lanza, a staff scientist on its team, is helping make some pretty remarkable discoveries with it. On this episode, Nina tells us about a high concentration of manganese recently uncovered that tells us a lot about Mars’ past, and suggests that it might have been complete with a lot more oxygen than we initially thought. Links Press Release for Nina Lanza’s paper Nina’s Twitter Account ChemCam’s website Video showing ChemCam in action Curiosity’s website Los Alamos National Lab WeMartians Theme Song is “RetroFuture” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/