<What I did find cool was the idea posted there in a different article of using a laser for long distance spectrometry... fire off a short high peak energy pulse at an object, turning a few cubic microns into plasma- analyze the emission of the plasma and voila...you know its composition....the researchers claim to have made it work at a distance of 10's of meters... I can think of a LOT of space uses for something like that....

The folks who are working on it for Mars missions call it LIBS (Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy) and I think it gives elemental information from the spectra.

From what I've seen is they use YAG 1.064um for the LIBS then double the beam for a green Raman scattering for mineralogical data. There's a group at UH-Manoa working on it.