NASA’s Perseverance rover deposits first sample on Mars surface

A titanium tube containing a rock pattern is resting on the Crimson Planet’s floor after being positioned there on Dec. 21 by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Over the following two months, the rover will deposit a total of 10 tubes on the location, known as “Three Forks,” constructing humanity’s first pattern depot on one other planet. The depot marks a historic early step within the Mars Pattern Return marketing campaign.

Perseverance has been taking duplicate samples from rock targets the mission selects. The rover at present has the opposite 17 samples (together with one atmospheric pattern) taken to this point in its stomach. Primarily based on the structure of the Mars Pattern Return marketing campaign, the rover would ship samples to a future robotic lander.

The lander would, in flip, use a robotic arm to position the samples in a containment capsule aboard a small rocket that will blast off to Mars orbit, the place one other spacecraft would seize the pattern container and return it safely to Earth.

The depot will function a backup if Perseverance cannot ship its samples. In that case, a pair of Pattern Restoration Helicopters could be known as upon to complete the job.

The primary pattern to drop was a chalk-size core of igneous rock informally named “Malay,” which was collected on Jan. 31, 2022, in a area of Mars’ Jezero Crater known as “South Séítah.” Perseverance’s advanced Sampling and Caching System took nearly an hour to retrieve the steel tube from contained in the rover’s stomach, view it one final time with its inner CacheCam, and drop the pattern roughly 3 toes (89 centimeters) onto a rigorously chosen patch of Martian floor.

However the job wasn’t finished for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which constructed Perseverance and leads the mission. As soon as they confirmed the tube had dropped, the group positioned the WATSON digital camera positioned on the finish of Perseverance’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to see beneath the rover, checking to ensure that the tube hadn’t rolled into the trail of the rover’s wheels.

Additionally they needed to make sure the tube hadn’t landed in such a approach that it was standing on its finish (every tube has a flat finish piece known as a “glove” to make it simpler to be picked up by future missions). That occurred lower than 5% of the time throughout testing with Perseverance’s Earthly twin in JPL’s Mars Yard. In case it does occur on Mars, the mission has written a collection of instructions for Perseverance to rigorously knock the tube over with a part of the turret on the finish of its robotic arm.

In coming weeks, they’re going to produce other alternatives to see whether or not Perseverance wants to make use of the approach because the rover deposits extra samples on the Three Forks cache.

“Seeing our first pattern on the bottom is a superb capstone to our prime mission interval, which ends on Jan. 6,” mentioned Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy venture supervisor at JPL. “It is a good alignment that, simply as we’re beginning our cache, we’re additionally closing this primary chapter of the mission.”