NASA rover deposits first sample on Mars – NASA Mars Exploration

Filled with rocks, the sample tube will be one of 10 that form a tube depot that could be considered for the journey to Earth with the Mars Sample Return Campaign.

A titanium tube containing a rock sample rests on the surface of the Red Planet after being placed there On December 21st by NASA’s Mars Orbiter. Over the next two months, the rover will deposit a total of 10 tubes at the site, called “Three Forks,” building the first human sample repository on another planet. The warehouse represents an early historic step in the Mars sample return campaign.

Perseverance was sampling duplicates of rock targets chosen by the task. The rover currently has the other 17 samples (including one aerial sample) taken so far in her belly. Based on the architecture of the Mars Sample Return Campaign, the rover will deliver samples to a robotic lander in the future. The probe, in turn, will use a robotic arm to put the samples into a containment capsule aboard a small rocket that will blast off into Mars orbit, where another spacecraft will pick up the sample container and return it safely to Earth.

The warehouse will act as a backup if Perseverance cannot deliver its samples. In this case, a pair of sample recovery helicopters will be called in to finish the job.

The first sample dropped was a chalk-sized nucleus volcanic rocks Informally called “Malay,” it was collected on January 31, 2022, in an area of ​​Mars’ Jezero Crater called “South Séítah.” perseverance complex Sampling and buffering system It took him nearly an hour to extract the metal tube from the rover’s belly, and watch it one last time inside CacheCamand dropping the sample about 3 feet (89 cm) down on a carefully selected patch of the Martian surface.

But the job was not done for the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who built the Perseverance and led the mission. Once they confirmed that the tube had fallen off, the team set up Watson A camera at the end of the 7-foot (2-meter) robotic arm to peer below the rover, checking to make sure the tube did not roll into the path of the rover’s wheels.

They also wanted to ensure that the tube did not slump in such a way that it would stand on end (each tube has a flat end piece called a “glove” to make it easier to pick it up on future missions). This happened less than 5% of the time during testing with Perseverance Earthly twin At Mars Yard at JPL. In the event that this happened on Mars, the mission wrote a series of commands to Persevere to carefully hit the tube with the part of the tower at the end of its robotic arm.

In the coming weeks, they’ll have more chances to see if Perseverance needs to use the technique as the rover deposits more samples into Three Forks’ cache.

“Seeing our first sample on Earth is a wonderful culmination of our main mission period, which ends on January 6,” said Rick Welch, deputy project manager for Perseverance at JPL. “It’s a nice alignment, as we start our cache, we also close this first chapter of the quest.”

More about the mission

The main objective of the Mars Perseverance mission is Astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and will be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rocks and regoliths (broken rocks and dust).

Subsequent NASA missions, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s lunar exploration approach to Mars, which includes Artemis Missions to the Moon will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, operated by NASA’s Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., built and managed the rover’s operations.

Learn more about perseverance:

mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

News Media Contacts

Andrew Judd/DC Agile
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-2433 / 818-393-9011
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Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501
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