NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover drops the first sample on the Martian surface
Santa came early to Mars this year.
from NASA Perseverance mission dropped his first cache of precious rock samples into the sands of Marchleaving behind a record of material that a future mission might bring land. It is a key moment in research life on marsNASA officials said in a statement Wednesday (Dec. 21).
The rover’s contribution to the search for ‘ancient microbial life’ in an ancient river delta, as told by NASA’s Jet Propulsion in an update (opens in a new tab)will include 10 titanium tubes deposited in this location, nicknamed “Three Forks”.
Sometime in the 2030s, if the schedules hold, either Perseverance or two helicopters (similar to the Ingenuity Mars helicopter currently flying ended his 37th flight days ago) will transport rocky tubes like this in Jezero Crater to a waiting ship.
Related: Mars rover Perseverance to begin caching samples for future return to Earth
This tube is a safety deposit, however; Perseverance collects twin samples at each location and its mission calls for it to deliver itself, using the cache set inside the rover. But if necessary, helicopters could be called upon to collect the safety tubes left on the Martian surface.
However the tubes are delivered, a spacecraft will launch them into space and deliver the samples to a waiting orbiter to return the Martian samples to Earth. Apart from a few meteorites carved from Mars that fell to our planet, the historic shipment will represent the first time that rocks from the Red Planet have reached Earth.
One of the key ingredients of life is abundant on Mars, or at least it was in ancient times: water. Huge canyons, large icebergs and possible underwater reservoirs suggest that Mars was rich in water in the ancient past, despite the dry and dusty appearance of the planet today.
But if it was enough to endure life requires “basic truth”, which is where perseverance comes in. A rover can only carry so many instruments with it, however; Sending the samples back to Earth will allow entire laboratories 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 called “Malai” on January 31 in a region called “South Séítah.” The south of Séitah is significant; scientists announced weeks before taking the sample they had organics founda possible ingredient of life, in the same area.
It took the car-sized Perseverance about an hour to spit out its belly tube, where the sampling and cache system resides. The tube fell three feet (89 centimeters) to a flat spot on the Martian surface as planned, and Earth engineers imaged the area to make sure they didn’t accidentally roll over as Perseverance away
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The images came back showing that the tube was well away 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 touch 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 “Mars yard,” an adapted sandbox at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where machines are tested under conditions similar to of the red planet Vertical deposits occurred about five percent of the time in these simulations, which is why the mission has a backup.
The milestone drop comes just weeks before the end of Perseverance’s main mission 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 one upon sample return.
“It’s a nice alignment that, just as we’re starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission,” Rick Welch, assistant project manager for Perseverance at JPL, said in the same statement.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller? (opens in a new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in a new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) or Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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