A titanium tube with a rock sample is sitting on the surface of Mars after being dropped there by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on December 21. Over the following two months, the rover will deposit a total of ten tubes at the “Three Forks” area, constructing humanity’s first sample depot on another planet. The depot is a significant first step in the Mars Sample Return programme. Perseverance has been collecting duplicate samples from rock targets chosen by the mission. The rover now holds 17 samples (including one atmosphere sample) in its belly. The rover would send samples to a future robotic lander using the architecture of the Mars Sample Return programme.
The lander would next use a robotic arm to deposit the samples in a containment capsule on a tiny rocket that would blast off to Mars orbit, where another spacecraft would retrieve the sample container and securely return it to Earth. If Perseverance is unable to deliver its samples, the depot will act as a backup. In such event, a pair of Sample Recovery Helicopters would be sent to complete the task.
The first sample to fall was a chalk-size core of igneous rock tentatively designated “Malay,” which was gathered on Jan. 31, 2022, in a location of Mars’ Jezero Crater known as “South Sétah.” Perseverance’s complicated Sampling and Caching System required about an hour to remove the metal tube from within the rover’s belly, inspect it one final time with its internal CacheCam, then drop the sample around 3 feet (89 centimetres) onto a carefully chosen piece of Martian surface.
However, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which constructed Perseverance and oversees the project, were not finished. After confirming that the tube had fallen, the researchers used the WATSON camera at the end of Perseverance’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to peek underneath the rover to ensure that the tube hadn’t slid into the path of the rover’s wheels.
They also wanted to make sure the tube hadn’t fallen on its end (each tube has a flat end piece called a “glove” to make it easier to be picked up by future missions). This happened fewer than 5% of the time during testing with Perseverance’s Earthly duplicate in JPL’s Mars Yard. In case this occurs on Mars, the mission has programmed Perseverance to delicately knock the tube over using a portion of the turret at the end of its robotic arm. In the following weeks, they’ll have additional chances to see whether Perseverance needs to utilise the procedure when the rover drops more samples at the Three Forks cache.
“Seeing our first sample on the ground is a terrific climax to our prime mission phase, which concludes on January 6,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at JPL. “It’s a good coincidence that we’re beginning our cache just as we’re finishing the first chapter of the mission.”
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