The big Perseverance robot continues its mission: it has deposited a first sample collected on the ground of Mars. This is an important step.
That’s it, it’s done: Perseverance, the NASA rover sent to Mars, has deposited its first sample tube on the ground of the red planet. It was the American space agency which announced the news on December 21, 2022. NASA specifies that the deposit “ marks a historic milestone in the Mars Sample Return campaign”the mission responsible for recovering the Martian samples and returning them to Earth.
This is the first deposit in a series of 10, an operation which will be spread over several months and over a large area of land. This deposit is above all a crucial step in the Perseverance mission, which marks the start of the campaign to return samples collected on Mars.
Deposits of valuable samples on Mars
The sample deposited by Perseverance contains a sample of magmatic rock, indicates NASA, collected in January 2022 and nicknamed “Malay” by the space agency. In the days and weeks to come, the rover will drop other samples all over a specific area delimited by NASA.
The campaign to return Martian samples to Earth has been planned for a long time. Perseverance therefore does not drop samples at random. Since the start of sampling, the robot has each time collected two copies of the surfaces and rocks examined. In total, Perseverance filled 18 tubes. This is one of the duplicate copies that Perseverance has deposited (it keeps the other inside its “belly”).
The Mars Sample Return mission expects Perseverance to deliver these samples to a lander. This one will place them in turn in a rocket, going to Martian orbit, where another ship will leave with the box of samples in order to bring it back to Earth. But, in case there should be a problem at Perseverance, NASA has thought of a back-up plan that would still make it possible to recover samples: deposit duplicate copies on the ground of Mars before the mission. These tubes can then be recovered by small helicopters specially designed for the task.
It is this very important mission that Perseverance has just begun, with its first deposit. The rover must make 9 other deposits during the next few weeks, in an area called “Three Forks”. The spare copies will be deposited at a distance of 6 to 15 meters from each other, NASA explained.
Once the deposits are finished, Perseverance will once again be able to return to explore Mars and fill in new samples.