NASA’s Perseverance rover is getting set to lighten its load a bit on the Purple Planet.
Perseverance landed inside Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021 to hunt for indicators of historic Purple Planet life and accumulate samples for future return to Earth. The car-sized rover has drilled out 14 Mars rock cores to this point — two apiece from seven goal stones — and it’ll probably drop half of them in November or December, mentioned mission staff member Jim Bell of Arizona State College.
That is the other of carelessness; it is a safeguard designed to guard the general Mars sample-return project, which is a joint effort of NASA and the European House Company (ESA). The baseline plan requires Perseverance to ship its samples to a NASA lander that sports activities a built-in rocket, which is able to launch the Mars materials to orbit. An ESA-provided orbiter will then snag the samples and haul them again to Earth. They may land right here as quickly as 2033.
Associated: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s 1st year on Mars
The lander, Mars rocket and ESA orbiter are presently scheduled to launch within the 2027-2028 timeframe. Perseverance is in good well being, however there’s an opportunity the rover will not be doing so properly when that different {hardware} arrives on the Purple Planet. Therefore the approaching depot drop, which is able to contain one pattern from every drilled rock. (Perseverance will maintain the opposite pattern set onboard.)
“That is our backup pattern cache, simply in case the rover itself cannot ship samples,” Bell, the principal investigator for Persevance’s Mastcam-Z digital camera system, mentioned throughout a livestreamed presentation Thursday (Oct. 20) on the 2022 Mars Society Conference.
The NASA sample-return lander will carry two small helicopters, every of them modeled on Ingenuity, the little rotorcraft that landed on Jezero’s ground with Perseverance final 12 months and has aced greater than 30 Purple Planet flights since. If want be, the 2 choppers will carry pattern tubes, one after the other, from the depot — or depots, as there might find yourself being multiple — to the lander. (“Depot” is a barely overgrand time period for a spot the place tubes can be mendacity within the filth.)
The depot Perseverance will set up within the subsequent month or two is at a website dubbed Three Forks, which Bell mentioned is a “fairly flat space.” The topography is subsequently favorable for secure helicopter landings and liftoffs.
Perseverance has some work to do earlier than it may possibly head over to Three Forks, nevertheless. It is presently gathering regolith — samples of Martian sand and dust — and can probably proceed doing so by means of subsequent week, Bell mentioned.
Perseverance carries a total of 43 titanium tubes, 38 of that are designed to carry samples. The opposite 5 are “witness tubes” that can assist mission staff members decide which supplies, if any, in collected Martian samples could also be contaminants from Earth.
The rover has stuffed 15 of its sampling tubes to this point, 14 of them with drilled rock cores (although the staff is having trouble sealing up the tube with probably the most lately collected core). The opposite stuffed tube accommodates an “atmospheric pattern” — Martian air however nothing else, the results of a drilling effort that went awry due to a surprisingly crumbly rock.
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e-book concerning the seek for alien life. Comply with him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Comply with us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Facebook (opens in new tab).
