Perseverance drops off first Mars sample for future return to Earth

The primary of 17 titanium tubes at the moment stuffed with Mars’ materials collected by the Perseverance rover is now safely resting on the floor of the Pink Planet. It should ultimately be joined by 9 different tiny, light-saber-shaped tubes filled with chalk-sized cores of martian rocks and soil. Collectively, these tubes will type one in every of a number of deliberate cache depots which will ultimately be chosen for a return journey to Earth.

“Selecting the primary depot on Mars makes this exploration marketing campaign very actual and tangible,” David Parker, ESA’s director of Human and Robotic Exploration, mentioned in an ESA release. “Now we’ve got a spot to revisit with samples ready for us there.”

Perseverance collected this pattern from an igneous rock nicknamed “Malay,” situated in a area of Jezero Crater known as South Séítah, on Jan. 31, 2022.

Whereas testing how Perseverance would drop its pattern tubes on Earth, engineers discovered that the tubes would often — lower than 5 p.c of the time — land upright after falling the roughly 3 ft (89 centimeters) from the rover’s stomach to the bottom. Ought to a tube land vertically on Mars, the mission workforce plans to fastidiously knock it over with Perseverance’s arm.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Over the following two months, humanity’s first depot website on one other planet — at a location known as “Three Forks” — will develop to carry 10 total pattern tubes. If Three Forks is in the end chosen because the goal of NASA/ESA’s Mars Pattern Return marketing campaign, deliberate for launch within the late 2020s, Perseverance would choose up and cargo the samples onto a robotic lander, which might pack them right into a small return rocket. (A pair of Ingenuity-like helicopters would function retrieval backups ought to Perseverance not be as much as the duty.)

The small rocket would then launch the samples to Mars orbit for assortment by an orbital spacecraft. After assortment, they might start their journey to Earth in order that scientists might scrutinize the samples with a few of the most superior laboratory tools on this planet.

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

If all goes in accordance with plan, the primary batch of rock and soil plucked straight from Mars floor is expected to arrive on Earth in 2033.

“The primary depot of Mars samples may be thought of as a serious danger mitigation step for the Mars Pattern Return marketing campaign,” Parker within the ESA launch.

NASA/JPL-Caltech