The researchers are already thinking about where to deposit the first samples so that they can be collected by a future spacecraft. Once Perseverance works its way back down it may place some rock samples at the delta’s cusp in a flat area between Enchanted Lake and Hawksbill Gap. “We’ll probably drop the first cache when the rover gets there,” says Kenneth Farley, mission project scientist and geochemist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. »And then it really starts.«
The mission planners did not expect to be able to carry out tests on Mars so soon. But the situation there is excellent: the territory is flat. There are few obstacles that can stand in the way of a future collection probe. “It’s a great place to land on Mars,” says Jennifer Trosper.
NASA wants to organize a meeting in September 2022. Then the scientific community should judge whether their amassed collection is valuable enough to be picked up from Mars. An important question – after all, it takes a lot of time and money to bring the tubes with Martian rocks to Earth. In this way, NASA wants to ensure that “we have assembled the most valuable cache that this site can provide us with,” says Kenneth Farley.
Perseverance continues, Ingenuity will soon be over
The Mars Sample Return program is a $5 billion plan by NASA and ESA to send two landers to Mars. A rover would collect the samples on Mars and a rocket would launch them into Mars orbit. A spacecraft would capture the samples in orbit and bring them to Earth. Actually, it should start in 2026. However, this schedule was thrown into disarray by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Because the ESA has suspended all cooperation with the Russian space agency due to the war of aggression. The Russian-European Mars rover ExoMars is particularly influenced by this. That is why NASA and ESA are currently working together to revise their plans for future Mars landings.
Luckily, they have time for that: Perseverance’s sample tubes are made to withstand the harsh conditions of Mars for a few decades.
Perseverance does not only have rock samples from Mars on the program. The rover has also made discoveries of its own, observing how dust devils hurl large amounts of dust into the air and how the speed of sound changes in the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere of Mars. Perseverance has covered more than eleven kilometers so far. And the rover set an extraterrestrial record when it traveled five kilometers in just 30 Martian days in March and April.