Earlier this week, NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover dropped its first sample tube onto the Martian surface. Just two days later, the rover placed another tube containing a fragment of sedimentary rock from the edge of an ancient river delta on the Red Planet.
Over the next two months, the rover will place a total of 10 sample tubes in Three Forks, a region of Jezero Crater, creating the first sample deposit on a foreign planet ever made by humans. The deposit will mark a crucial milestone in the NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign that aims to bring scientifically selected Martian samples back to Earth for detailed analysis.
My second sample drop is fine! This tube contains a piece of sedimentary rock from the edge of the ancient river delta here – the longest rock core I’ve taken so far. Learn more about each of my samples: pic.twitter.com/3YTSxPlh4z
— NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 23, 2022
In a series of tweets, the mission team also explained why they’re not worried about the samples the rover is leaving behind: Could the Martian wind blow them away or gradually bury them underground?
The Perseverance mission team is optimistic that the sample tubes will remain exposed. They’re also meticulously recording the exact location of where the rover places the tubes so retrieving them in the future shouldn’t be a problem.
In the event that the Perseverance rover fails to deliver its samples directly to the lander, the repository will serve as a backup. In this case, two Ingenuity-inspired sample recovery helicopters would be required to complete the task.
According to Richard Cook, MSR program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, these sample tubes will be arranged in a complex zigzag pattern on the Martian surface, with each sample spaced between 16 and 49 feet (5 15 meters) away from the Proxim. This is because recovery helicopters can only interact with one tube at a time.