Perseverance Deposits First Sample on Mars Surface: After the Perseverance team confirmed that the first sample tube was on the surface, they positioned the WATSON camera at the end of the rover’s robotic arm looking down the rover to check that the tube had not rolled into the pipeline. wheels. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS. Download image ›
The rock-filled sample tube will be one of 10 tubes that make up the tube depot that could be earmarked for the trip to Earth by the Mars Sample Return campaign.
A titanium tube containing a rock sample is placed on the surface of the Red Planet and rests on its surface where December 21 By NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Over the next two months, the rover will place a total of 10 tubes at Three Forks, establishing humanity’s first sample repository on another planet. Depo history is a first step Sample Return to Mars campaign.
Azm takes duplicate samples from mission-selected rock targets. Rover currently has another 17 examples (including an atmospheric sample) taken so far in the abdomen. Based on the architecture of the Mars Sample Return campaign, the rover would deliver samples to a future robotic lander. The lander would, in turn, use a robotic arm to place the samples into a storage capsule aboard a small rocket that would blast off into Mars orbit, where another spacecraft would grab the sample container and return it safely to Earth.
The warehouse will serve as a backup if Perseverance cannot deliver its samples. In this case, a pair of Sample Recovery Helicopters will be called in to finish the job.
The first sample fired was a chalk-sized core igneous rock Gathered in January, it was informally named “Malay”. 31, 2022, in the “South Seita” region of Jezero Crater on Mars. Endurance complex Sampling and caching system It took almost an hour to remove the metal tube from inside the rover’s belly, one last look at it with its insides CacheCamand drop the sample about 3 feet (89 centimeters) into a carefully selected patch of the Martian surface.
But that was not the case for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Perseverance and is leading the mission. After confirming that the tube had fallen, the team deployed it WATSON A camera at the end of Perseverance’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm looks under the rover to make sure the pipe isn’t rolling into the path of the rover’s wheels.
They also wanted to ensure that the tube wouldn’t land on its tip (each tube has a flat tip called a “glove” to make it easier to pick up by future missions). This happened less than 5% of the time during testing with Perseverance’s Earth twin at JPL’s Mars Yard. If this happens on Mars, the mission wrote a series of commands to Persistence to carefully collapse the tube with a part of the tower at the end of the robotic arm.
In the coming weeks, they’ll have other opportunities to see if Perseverance should use the technique as the rover deposits more samples in the Three Forks cache.
“Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great sign for our main mission cycle, which ends in January. 6,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at JPL.
More about the mission
The primary objective of Perseverance’s mission to Mars astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and store Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).
Subsequent NASA missions, in collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency), will send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon-to-Mars exploration approach. Artemis Missions to the Moon to help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
It builds and manages the operations of the JPL Perseverance rover, operated by Caltech for NASA in Pasadena, California.
For more information on Perseverance:
mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
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Andrew Good / DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
818-393-2433 / 818-393-9011
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov / agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
