I Am Curious… Rock

As you probably know, the Mars rover Curiosity includes, among its impressive onboard chemical-analysis instruments, a powerful laser. The idea is to focus in on small pebbles here and there on the Red Planet’s surface; from a distance of a few meters, the laser can zap a spot on a pebble very briefly, but strongly enough that it heats up, emitting gases and tiny particles whose chemical spectra can then be analyzed.

The JPL/NASA team announced early this past weekend that they’d singled out the first target for testing, a tiny little pyramid of basalt at first simply numbered N165… and, shortly, renamed Coronation. The scheduled moment of zapping was Sunday.

Of course, as with any public event, this one brought the Internet wags out in force. Of particular interest at the moment is the Twitter feed of a user named N165 aka Coronation. The first few tweets went up on Saturday (read from the bottom up):

The one-sided public conversation between rock and robot unwound in entertaining fashion from that point forward, climaxing on Sunday in this fashion (again, read bottom to top):

Not to worry! As of today, N165 has continued to tweet from time to time, infinitesimally more lightweight and maybe just a shade more (other)worldly-wise.

(Interested in non-fictional, well-informed but highly accessible news about the Curiosity rover’s mission? You could do much worse than to periodically check the Bad Astronomy blog’s ongoing posts on the subject.)