NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover drops first sample on the Martian surface
Santa got to Mars early this year.
from NASA perseverance mission dropped its first cache of precious rock samples on the sands of Marsleaving behind a record of material that a future mission could bring back to land. It is a key moment in the search for life on marsNASA officials said in a statement on Wednesday (December 21).
The rover’s contribution to the search for “ancient microbial life” in an ancient river delta, as NASA’s Jet Propulsion said in an update (opens in a new tab)it will include 10 titanium tubes deposited in this place, nicknamed “Three Forks”.
Sometime in the 2030s, if the schedules hold, Perseverance or two helicopters (similar to the Ingenuity Mars helicopter currently in flight that finished his flight 37 days ago) will transport rocky tubes like this one in Jezero Crater to a waiting ship.
Related: The Perseverance Mars rover will begin caching samples for a future return to Earth
However, this tube is a backup deposit; Perseverance collects twin samples at each location and its mission requires it to make the delivery itself, using the set of caches inside the rover. But if necessary, helicopters could be called in to pick up backup tubes left on the Martian surface.
Regardless of how the tubes are delivered, a spacecraft will launch them into space and deliver the samples to an orbiter waiting to return the Martian samples to Earth. apart from a few meteors Carved from Mars that fell on our planet, the historic shipment will represent the first time rocks from the Red Planet have reached Earth.
One of the key ingredients of life seems abundant on Mars, or at least it was in ancient times: water. Huge canyons, vast icebergs, and possible underwater deposits suggest that Mars was rich in water in the ancient past, despite the dry and dusty appearance of the planet today.
But whether there was enough to sustain life requires “basic truth”, which is where Perseverance comes into play. However, a rover can only carry a limited number of instruments; sending the samples back to Earth will allow entire labs the opportunity to sift through the Martian fragments for signatures of ancient life.
The first sample to hit the regolith is about the size of a piece of chalk, collected from an igneous rock nicknamed “Malay” on January 31 in a region called “South Séítah.” South Séítah is itself significant; Scientists announced weeks before the sample was taken that they had organic founda possible ingredient of life, in the same area.
It took about an hour for the car-sized Perseverance to spit out its belly tube, where the sampling and caching system resides. The tube dropped three feet (89 centimeters) to a flat spot on the Martian surface as planned, and engineers on Earth imaged the area to ensure they don’t accidentally pass it as Perseverance zooms away.
In pictures: 12 Amazing Images From The Perseverance Rover’s First Year On Mars
The images came back showing the tube was well out of the way and flat, but NASA had a contingency plan in case the tube ended up upright in the sand. “The mission has written a series of commands for Perseverance to carefully shoot down the tube with part of the turret at the end of its robotic arm,” agency officials wrote.
Engineers tested the tube-flattening procedure with a Perseverance-like rover inside the “yard of Mars,” a converted sandbox at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the machines are tested under conditions similar to those of the Red Planet. Vertical deposits occurred about five percent of the time in these simulations, which is why the mission is supported.
The milestone drop is happening just a few weeks before the end of the main Perseverance quest on January 6, 2023; the mission will mark two Earth years on the Martian surface on February 18. The rover will continue to travel through an extension of the mission, based on its scientific publications and contributions like this to sample return.
“It’s a good lineup that just as we’re starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission,” Rick Welch, deputy project manager for Perseverance at JPL, said in the same statement.
Elizabeth Howell is co-author of “Why am I taller? (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book on space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Espaciodotcom (opens in a new tab) either Facebook (opens in a new tab).