![]() The rover also deposited an atmospheric sample and what’s called a “ witness” tube, which is used to determine if samples being collected might be contaminated with materials that traveled with the rover from Earth. ![]() Mission scientists believe the igneous and sedimentary rock cores provide an excellent cross section of the geologic processes that took place in Jezero shortly after the crater’s formation almost 4 billion years ago. The depot samples will serve as a backup set while the other half remain inside Perseverance, which would be the primary means to convey samples to a Sample Retrieval Lander as part of the campaign. One sample from each pair taken so far now sits in the carefully arranged depot in the “Three Forks” region of Jezero Crater. Throughout its science campaigns, the rover has been taking a pair of samples from rocks the mission team deems scientifically significant. This major milestone involved precision planning and navigation to ensure the tubes could be safely recovered in the future by the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign, which aims to bring Mars samples to Earth for closer study. 29, by mission controllers at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Confirmation that NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover successfully dropped the 10th and final tube planned for the depot was received around 5 p.m. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.Less than six weeks after it began, construction of the first sample depot on another world is complete. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA's Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust). ![]() Those with “core” were taken by the rover’s CacheCam, which visually inspects a sample tube after a coring event takes place.Ī key objective for Perseverance's mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. Those inset images annotated with the word “abrade” were captured by the rover’s WATSON imager. Also indicated is the Martian day, or sol, of the rover’s mission and whether the image shows a target that has been abraded for proximity science or from which a core sample was taken.īefore collecting a sample, Perseverance uses its drill to abrade the upper few millimeters of the rock surface close to the intended coring target. The name that the Perseverance science and operations teams used to define a rock target on the Martian surface appears at the top of each inset image. ![]() This annotated map shows the locations where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover collected its first witness tube and filled its first six samples.
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