NASA’s Perseverance Mission buried its first cache of precious rock samples in the Martian desert, documenting the presence of material that could be recovered and returned to Earth on future missions. A NASA official said: statement It announced Wednesday that this is a critical time in its mission to find life on Mars.
By the time the first mission ends on January 6, 2023, the mission will have spent exactly two years on Earth, counting to land on Mars on February 18. Expand your rover’s missions.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in an update that the rover will place 10 titanium tubes in “Three Forks” to search for “ancient microbial life” in dried-up river deltas. Here’s a video of his JPL from NASA explaining the process.
In the 2030s, if all goes according to plan, either Perseverance or two helicopters (like the currently flying Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which recently completed its 37th flight) will see stone wreckage like these. You will bring the tubes from the Jezero Crater to the ship.
However, the purpose of Perseverance requires that the samples themselves be delivered using caching within the rover. So this tube is just a backup depot. There is also the possibility of retrieving emergency spare tubes from Mars by helicopter.
Regardless of how the tubes travel into space, the orbiter will pick them up and return them from Mars to Earth. This is the first time that Martian rocks have reached Earth, except for a few meteorites that have fallen to Earth after being carved into the Red Planet.
The presence of water, one of the elements necessary for life, suggests that Mars may have once been habitable. Mars looks dry and dusty now, but large canyons, large icebergs, and even underwater reservoirs indicate that it may have had large amounts of water in the past.
However, it takes “ground truth” to determine if there was enough to sustain life, and patience is required here. Give the entire lab a chance to examine signs of ancient life.
The first sample to reach regolith is an igneous rock called ‘Murray’ from the ‘South Seta’ area on 31 January. This is about the size of a piece of chalk. South Sehat’s importance isn’t limited to the samples themselves. A few weeks before the samples were taken, scientists reported finding organic matter, a potential building block for life, in the same area.
The tube containing the sampling and caching device took almost an hour for the car-sized Perseverance to exhale from the body. Engineers on Earth photographed this region to ensure that Perseverance’s wheels did not roll over the tubes as he fell 3 feet (89 cm) onto the flat surface of Mars.
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