No, I dont mean the Long Island Bowling Society- I am referring to Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy. LIBS allows determining the composition of an object at a distance. The range of of this technique used to be restricted to at most tens of meters- even that could be useful for a future mars probe- imagine a rover sitting still for a day charging and firing a laser and learning the composition of anything within 30 meters. That would be a very useful time saving device! Only visiting rocks that you find interesting ahead of time!

Now it appears the range of this technique has been extended to the Kilometer range: http://optics.org/articles/news/10/11/8/1

Clever use of the odd behavior of short high peak intensity pulses in the atmosphere has allowed us to beat the diffraction limit and project high intensities at greater distances...

High intensity laser pulses do not require huge energy to generate. Intensity is just power per unit area... Intensity is thus increased by the inverse square of the radius of the spot a given power is focussed on... (same energy in a smaller spot= higher intensity). Power is just energy per unit time, so the faster you deliver a given energy, the higher the power... 250 milliwatts delivered in 100 femto seconds results in a power of 2.5 TeraWatts... now focus that onto a spot .1 millimeter on a side and you have an intensity of 2.5 * 10^16 watts per square centimeter. No material on earth can stand such an intensity- it becomes a plasma, and radiates light unique to its components- by analyzing this light you can know what the material is made of after vaporizing only a few cubic microns of material.

Such high intensity pulses behave oddly in a medium... nonlinear effects can lead to a self focussing, the beam turns the air into a wave guide and forms high intensity filaments that dont hold to the diffraction limit... allowing you to project high intensity at much greater distances.

Now imagine a Rover equipped with a telescope and LIBS setup- able to sample the composition of everything within a kilometer- it would be an exponential increase in our abilities...

I dont know if such effects would still work in Mars' thin atmosphere, but the power of a rover able to know the composition of everything in a kilometer of it- just imagine!.... But even if the effect isnt possible on mars, just being able to sample every rock in 30 meters would be amazingly valuable!

Laser tech isnt up to the challenge today, but in a few years it will be...