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that of NASA Perseverance rover will soon try again to catch its first sample from Mars.
Perseverance landed inside the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater last February, as part of a mission to search for signs of seniority martian life and collect dozens of drilled samples for a future return to Earth. On August 6, the car-sized robot attempted to take the first of these samples, but things didn’t go as planned: the Perseverance rock pierced the turned out surprisingly sweet, breaking into crumbly pieces that failed to enter the sample tube.
Since then, the rover has traveled 1,493 feet (455 meters) to a steep ridge that the mission team calls “Citadelle” (French for “castle”), which appears to offer greener sampling pastures. .
Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos from NASA’s Perseverance rover
“The ridge is capped with a layer of rock that appears to resist wind erosion, a sign that it is more likely to hold up while drilling,” officials from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California said. of the South, which manages the mission of Perseverance, wrote in an update Thursday (August 26).
The rover team spotted a particularly attractive target at Citadel – a rock nicknamed “Rochette”. Over the next few days, Perseverance will use a tool at the end of its 2.1m-long robotic arm to abrade rock, allowing mission team members to get a glimpse of its basement. If they like what they see, next week they’ll order Perseverance to drill Rochette and take a sample, which will hopefully be kept in one of the rover’s 42 remaining tubes.
And the mission team added a step in the sampling process for this attempt, to make sure Perseverance doesn’t stuff another empty tube. After Rochette’s drilling and sampling, the rover will come to a stop, giving the team time to examine photos of the tube captured by Perseverance’s powerful Mastcam-Z imaging system. Persistence will only seal the tube if these photos show it does indeed contain a sample, NASA officials said.
That being said, the sealed empty tube from the August 6 trial is far from a disaster. Perseverance still has over 40 other tubes left, after all. And the mission team had planned to collect an empty tube at some point in the mission anyway, so that researchers here on Earth could study a pristine sample of the Martian atmosphere.
“By returning samples to Earth, we hope to answer a number of scientific questions, including the composition of Mars’ atmosphere,” said Project Perseverance scientist Ken Farley, based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. , in Thursday’s update. “This is why we are interested in an atmospheric sample with rock samples.”
NASA and the European Space Agency are teaming up to bring Perseverance samples back to Earth. Martian material could land here from 2031, if everything goes well.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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