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, referred to 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 presently has the opposite 17 samples (together with one atmospheric pattern) taken thus far in its stomach. Based mostly 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 might 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 can be referred to 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 referred to as “South Séítah.” Perseverance’s complicated Sampling and Caching System took virtually an hour to retrieve the metallic tube from contained in the rover’s stomach, view it one final time with its inside CacheCam, and drop the pattern roughly 3 toes (89 centimeters) onto a rigorously chosen patch of Martian floor.

However the job wasn’t accomplished 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 crew positioned the WATSON digital camera positioned on the finish of Perseverance’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to look beneath the rover, checking to make certain that the tube hadn’t rolled into the trail of the rover’s wheels.

In addition they needed to make sure the tube hadn’t landed in such a method that it was standing on its finish (every tube has a flat finish piece referred to 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 sequence 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 method 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.”