Preliminary Evaluation of the Mars 2020 Rover's SuperCam Development Unit: Co-Aligned Chemical and Mineralogical Analyses

Scheduled to be launched in July/August 2020, the next Mars rover will continue the geological and astrobiological exploration of the martian surface. One of the selected instrument suites on its science payload is called SuperCam. SuperCam will have five science techniques that it will deploy remotely to study the chemistry, mineralogy, and small scale morphology of Mars. These techniques include laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for chemistry, Raman/time resolved fluorescence (TRF) and visible-near infrared (VISIR) spectroscopy for mineralogy, a microphone to support the LIBS analyses, and a color remote micro imager (RMI) for context imagery and textural analyses [1].