NASA: Perseverance has deposited on the surface of Mars the first sample of “back-up” rocks intended for Earth

The long and complex process of transporting the first samples from Mars to Earth has just begun. The Perseverance rover of the American Space Agency (NASA) deposited on the surface of the planet the first sample of Martian rocks, closed inside a special cylindrical titanium capsule.

The car-sized rover has long been taking duplicate samples of the Martian rocks targeted by mission scientists on Earth. He keeps some samples the same (these are intended to be retrieved by another robotic craft in the future and eventually brought back to Earth for analysis by scientists), while other identical samples he has begun depositing on the Martian surface as a “back-up” in case something’s wrong.

Over the next two months, the rover will deposit a total of ten cylinders of samples, which until now have been kept in its “belly”. The deposit is made at a specific location, where the first “repository” of samples on another planet will be created. So far the rover has collected 17 samples, including one from the Martian atmosphere.

The plan of NASA engineers is to land a rover on Mars, which with its robotic arm will collect the samples that the rover will have and place them on a small rocket. The latter will launch and orbit Mars, until it finally meets up with another craft, which will collect the samples and bring them back to Earth. A key issue will be finding possible traces of microbial life in scientific laboratories.

The entire mission, which will be carried out sometime in the 2030s, is considered highly complex and it remains to be seen whether it will be successful. If the original plan fails and Perseverance fails to deliver its samples, then the alternate plan will be implemented and two small helicopters (similar to the Ingenuity that just made its 37th Mars flyby) will be sent to pick up the reserve samples, which will have been deposited on the Martian surface, to carry them to the rocket, which will then be launched from the “red” planet.

The first sample deposited on the surface, is the size of chalk and was taken by the rover in January this year from an area of ​​the Jezero crater. It took Perseverance about an hour to retrieve the titanium metal cylinder containing the sample from its “belly,” take one last picture of it with its camera, and drop the sample from a height of 89 centimeters onto the flat Martian surface. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, which built and control the rover, then pointed another of its cameras at the ground to make sure the sample cylinder didn’t get tangled in Perseverance’s wheels.

RES-EMP

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