WEBVTT

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Our next question comes from Palak from Chicago. How will the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

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find out about the ground's chemical components from orbit?

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Okay. Well, we have a spectrometer onboard, and as the name implies, it uses the spectrum of light to look at the surface in a range of wavelengths.

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You've probably seen light go through a prism and split into a range of colors.

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The spectrum of light in the visible wavelength actually has a whole bunch of different colors at different wavelengths.

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So, as light strikes the surface, depending on how that light interacts with the surface, some of it will be absorbed in one color or

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reflected in another color, and that tells us what the color is. Similarly, a spectrometer looks at a different part of the spectrum,

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not the visible part but a different part, and it looks at the spectrum that's returned.

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So, given mineral, you know, like quartz and calcite, they look the same, they're white, it's a little bit hard to tell them apart,

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but with the spectrometer, as they look at it in a different part of the wavelength,

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different parts on the surface, the different elements and atoms in that,

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in that mineral, will cause the spectrum to have a different appearance.

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It'll, it'll be absorbed in one part and reflected in another part.

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So each mineral has its own unique signature that we can see from using the spectrometer onboard.

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