NASA’s Perseverance rover collects first Martian rock sample | March

NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully collected its first rock sample on Mars. If all goes according to plan, this sample, along with many others, could one day be brought back to Earth for analysis.

The sample was drilled into a rock the size of a briefcase, nicknamed Rochette, on September 1. The boulder belongs to a ridge line nearly a kilometer long that overlooks the bottom of Jezero Crater, where Perseverance landed on February 18. An attempt on August 6 to drill and store a different rock was unsuccessful when the sample collapsed into powder before it could be placed in one of the 43 titanium sample tubes carried by the rover. .

The tube containing the Rochette pencil-wide sample will be hermetically sealed and stored inside the rover. When all of the sample tubes are filled with a variety of rocks, Perseverance will cache the tubes on the surface of the planet.

Future missions of the European Space Agency and NASA will work together to collect these samples, load them onto a rocket to put them into orbit, from where they will be transferred to a return vehicle. If successful, the sample should be back on Earth by the early 2030s.