Mars Rover Carries a Piece of Dunedin

A piece of Dunedin is millions of miles away right now on the surface of Mars.

The Mars rover Curiosity that landed earlier this month carried with it instruments from Ocean Optics, a company that calls Douglas Avenue home, WTSP 10 News reports.

Curiosity brough along three Ocean Optics spectrometers — "sensors about the size of a paperback book that use light to tell from a distance exactly what makes up a particular rock," the news station reports.

Ocean Optics Chairman Rob Randelman described some of the challenges of making scientific instruments meant to be transported millions of miles away for use on another planet.

"You don't get repairmen to come up to Mars to fix things," Randelman told 10 News. "And you have to make sure — way ahead of time — that everything's going to work perfectly the very first time."

The sensors are used to analyze tiny clouds of pulverized rocks after Curiosity zaps them with lasers. 

Check out some of the recent images the rover has sent back from the Red Planet.