NASA’s Perseverance rover finally deposited its first of 10 Martian rock samples to bring back to Earth, and the car-sized robotic explorer began its mission to find ancient biomarkers in the mud on the Red Planet on April 22 that could indicate the presence of alien life there. .
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, the explorer was walking around the Delta to search for sampling sites that might contain ancient organic microbes, before digging to extract a sample, and most of those it has collected so far are still in its belly, but this is the first to be done. Drop it at the Delta base, and it can be retrieved on a future mission.
The titanium tube contains a core of igneous rocks extracted from the Jezero Crater region of Mars called “South Setah” on January 31. The sample was unofficially named “Malay”, a duplicate of one of 17 samples currently hidden in the belly of Perseverance. Malays at the base of the delta on December 21, at a site known as the “Three Forks”, referring to the place where three options for a route into the delta merged.
This marks the first of 10 duplicates that will be deposited here over the next two months. The plan is for Perseverance to deliver its original samples to a robotic lander that will reach Mars in the future. The rover will then use a robotic arm to place tubes in the containment capsule of a small rocket, which will then be launched. to the orbit of Mars.
There, another spacecraft will come to pick up the containment capsule and return it to Earth, in what is known as the Mars sample return drive. However, if Perseverance cannot deliver its original samples to the rover, two sample recovery helicopters will collect the duplicate samples instead.
It took nearly an hour for the drop to complete after Perseverance reached the Three Forks site, and that’s because it first had to reach into its belly to catch the troughs, then watch it with CacheCam’s internal camera, and then, drop it about three feet (89 cm) on the surface of Mars. .