Yuba-sutter’s connection to the ‘Perseverance’ rover

Last week, the Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars, completing a seven-month journey from Earth.

Sam Clegg, a senior scientist with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a 1987 graduate of Yuba City High School, worked with colleagues on Supercam – a device mounted on the rover that uses laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to examine rocks and soils with a camera, laser and spectrometers to seek organic compounds that could be related to past life on Mars.

“I think it’s going to be exciting to see what this really tells us about the past on Mars,” Clegg said.

The rover is the most advanced exploration device ever sent to Mars and it landed in a crater that is believed

to have been a lake approximately 3.5 billion years ago, according to Clegg. He said from orbit, the features of a delta where water would have run into the lake can be seen. By sending a rover, the area can be analyzed in more detail. He said the combination of carbonates and clay in the area could mean there is evidence of past life on Mars.

“It is conceivable that early microbes could have been there when there was water in Jezero Crater,” Clegg said.

Clegg said half of his time will now go into Mars operations and analyzing data that the Supercam returns. He will then put reports together that will be available to the rest of the science team and lead to new commands being created for the rover.

Supercam captures a color image and is equipped with a microphone that can pick up the pinging noise a material makes when the laser hits the sample, which can indicate what type of material is being analyzed. Clegg and the Los Alamos lab also contributed to SHERLOC, a device mounted to the end of the

rover’s arm that looks for organics and minerals on the planet’s surface.

Clegg has worked at the lab since 2003 and for most of his time has been working on LIBS with principal investigator Roger Wiens. He worked on a chemistry and camera device, or Chemcam, that is mounted on the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars in 2012. His experience

with analyzing data from Chemcam will help with the latest rover.

“With Supercam I know better what to expect,” Clegg said.

In terms of the information the new rover passes along, Clegg said he is not setting expectations and is excited for what will be discovered. Around 2015, Clegg and Wiens submitted a proposal to

NASA to work on and control the Supercam and after approval it took five years to build the instrument.

Clegg attended Chico State after Yuba City High School, got his master’s degree in chemistry from San Jose State and a PHD in chemistry from Indiana University.

–David Wilson, dwilson@ appealdemocrat.com