NASA Perseverance rover collects first Martian rock sample

NASA’s Mars science rover Perseverance has collected and hidden the first of many mineral samples that the US space agency hopes to recover from the surface of the Red Planet for analysis on Earth.

Tools attached to Perseverance and operated by mission specialists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles drilled a core of rock slightly thicker than a pencil from an ancient Martian lake bed, then l ‘sealed in a titanium specimen tube inside the rover.

NASA chief and former astronaut Bill Nelson hailed it as “a momentous achievement.”

The space agency plans to collect up to 43 mineral samples over the next few months from the bottom of Jerezo Crater, a large basin where scientists believe water sank and microbial life may have thrived ago. billions of years.

The SUV-sized six-wheeled vehicle is also expected to explore the walls of sediment deposited at the foot of a river delta remaining once etched into a corner of the crater and considered a prime study location.

Two future missions to Mars, which will be carried out jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, are planned to recover these specimens over the next decade and bring them back to Earth, where astrobiologists will examine them for signs of tiny fossilized organisms.

ngenuity Mars Helicopter flies over Mars in an undated illustration provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA / JPL-Caltech / Handout (credit: NASA / JPL-CALTECH / HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)

Such fossils would represent the first conclusive evidence that life has ever existed beyond Earth.

Perseverance, the fifth and by far the most sophisticated rover NASA has sent to Mars since its first, Sojourner, arrived in 1997, landed in Jerezo Crater in February after flying 293 million miles from Earth.

The success of the first collection of samples, taken from a flat rock the size of a briefcase using the rotary impact drill at the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm, has been verified by images taken by the rover’s cameras while the sample was measured, cataloged and stored, NASA said.

The rover’s sampling and caching system, made up of more than 3,000 parts, has been described by acting JPL director Larry James as “the most complex mechanism ever to be sent to space.”