With plans to send rock and soil samples from Mars to Earth, the Perseverance rover has deposited the first tube with core samples to be picked up by future missions on the Red Planet. The titanium tube contains a rock sample and is resting on the Red Planet’s surface after being placed.
The rover will deposit a total of 10 such titanium tubes containing rock and soil samples from the Red Planet's surface over the next two months. The samples are being placed in at the location, called “Three Forks,” marking the construction of the first such sample depot on another world.
The depot will serve as a backup if Perseverance can’t deliver its samples. In that case, a pair of Sample Recovery Helicopters would be called upon to finish the job. Nasa said that the rover has taken a total of 17 samples so far in the over two years of its operation on the planet.
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 in a containment capsule aboard a small rocket that would blast off to Mars orbit, where another spacecraft would capture the sample container and return it safely to Earth.
The first sample to have been dropped on the surface is a chalk-size core of igneous rock that was collected in January this year. The sample was stored in the rover’s belly and the Sampling and Caching System took almost an hour to retrieve the metal tube. The tube was dropped on the surface about 3 feet away onto a carefully selected patch of Martian surface.
The rover also captured images of the tube checking to be sure that the tube hadn’t rolled into the path of the rover’s wheels. “Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great capstone to our prime mission period, which ends on Jan. 6. “It’s a nice alignment that, just as we’re starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission,” Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager said.
Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) are working to return the first samples of soil and rock from another world to Earth. Earlier, few days ago, Nasa had to postpone the proposed spacewalk after reports of a large piece of incoming Russian debris as thrusters were fired to dodge it. American astronauts Frank Rubio and Josh Cassada were to walk out of the flying lab to augment the International Space Station’s power generation system.
The spacewalk was postponed for 24 hours so that the orbiting lab’s ISS Progress 81 cargo craft could fire its engines to maneuver the station and avoid an approaching piece of rocket debris. Nasa said that spacewalkers Rubio and Cassada will install another roll-out solar array, also known as an International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array (iROSA), on the space station’s truss structure. "This time the duo will maneuver to the opposite side of the station and install the fourth iROSA on the Port-4 truss structure," Nasa said in a statement.
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