Summary

Description	Pawan from Sharjah: The spectrometers on MER-A and B split the visible light into many colors which identify minerals. How is the spectrometer on the MRO different from the ones on the two rovers? Okay. Yeah, on the rovers there are actually three different spectrometers looking at a whole bunch of different parts of the spectrum. One looks at, it's called the Moessbauer spectrometer, and it looks in the part of the spectrum that is particularly sensitive to iron minerals. Another is the APXS, the alpha-proton X-ray spectrometer, and as that implies, it looks for those types of particles, X-rays, protons, so that can see a certain part of the spectrum and identify certain kinds of minerals. They also have a thermal-emission spectrometer, so it looks in the thermal part of the whole spectrum of wavelengths. So they are sensitive to a certain kind of mineral. Our spectrometer is in a different wavelength. Sometimes dust can be a problem and get in the way of getting a good spectrum,
Date	2005-08-18
Source	images.nasa.gov

Licensing

Public Domain (US Government Work)