NASA details next steps after Mars Rover’s attempt to collect rocks goes awry

NASA scientists were quite excited in early August when the Perseverance rover reported it had drilled its first Martian rock sample. But it turned out that the the sample tube was empty, and the Perseverance team began a remote investigation to solve the mystery of the endangered rock.

Kenneth Farley, a project scientist at the California Institute of Technology and member of the Perseverance team, outlined the next steps for the mission in a blog post published at the end of last week. The rocky target in question, nicknamed Roubion, turned to dust as the rover pierced it. The target was a flat stone, part of the rough, fractured stretch of the crater at Jezero Crater that NASA scientists said may contain some of the oldest information about the dried up lake bed; if not evidence of fossil life, the rock sample would at least contain information about the ancient history of the climate and geology of the Red Planet.

Because the flat, polygonal target stone was found to be unsuitable for sampling, Farley said the team turned to “rocks as different as possible … to allow us to test the idea that Roubion does. was just a poorly elevated rock “. The next target is the Citadel, an outcrop of a quarter-mile rocky ridge in the crater. The Citadel rocks are a very different type of coring project than the finely layered sediments of the Crater Floor-Fractured Rough.

Farley said the team will likely choose a sampling target on Citadel and start planning coring this week, with the goal of sampling the outcrop in late August. If this attempt is successful, the Citadel rock will be the first of dozens of samples to be extracted from the Martian surface. NASA anticipates that these samples will eventually be recovered by another mission and brought back to Earth in the early 2030s. All in all, this mission would be one of the most ambitious in the recent history of space exploration, and certainly in the history of Martian exploration. If the samples are successfully brought to Earth, they will be the most distant objects in space collected. by humanity.

After Citadel, there is some elements already in the program for Perseverance. The rover must check the details of the Séítah, a strip covered with dunes in the crater, and it must eventually arrive at the delta that sinks into the crater, a site that the researchers say holds the most promise in terms of potential astrobiology. (This hope is based on where primordial microorganisms tend to arise on Earth – the delta of the river is the Martian analogue.)

But before Perseverance got to the delta, Farley said the rover could go back into the fractured rough and try to dig it again. There’s a chance Perseverance wasn’t lucky with a particularly stubborn rock., he said, adding that rocks from the same region which stiground raising could be structurally sounder and therefore better sampling targets.

The entire Perseverance mission is expected to last two years, so hopefully the first sampling attempt was just one hit in an otherwise exceptional one. career on Mars.