SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
On Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover Drilled the Rocks It Came For
On Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover Drilled the Rocks It Came For [nytimes.com]
After an earlier drilling attempt mysteriously failed, the robotic mission collected the first tube of samples that may one day help scientists understand the red planet.
This time, the rock did not disappear.
After a perplexing failure last month, NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, was able to drill a sample of rock on Wednesday. The rover took pictures of the rock in the tube and sent the images to Earth so that mission managers could be sure they had not come up empty again. Then Perseverance will seal the collection tube and put it away in its belly.
The success, visible in images posted online on Thursday, is most likely a relief to scientists working on the mission.
“You can see a beautiful rock core,” Kenneth A. Farley, a professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology and the project scientist for Perseverance, said in an email on Thursday morning.
BBC: Perseverance: Nasa's Mars rover makes second drill sample bid [bbc.com]
If Perseverance has been successful this time, it would represent the first ever rock section collected on another planet intended for return to Earth.
The rover is tasked with gathering more than two dozen cores over the next year or so that will be fetched home by a joint US and European effort later this decade.
[....] The deep, 45km-wide depression, some 20 degrees north of the planet's equator, looks to have held a lake billions of years ago.
Because of this, scientists think Jezero's sediments may hold traces of ancient microbial life [bbc.co.uk] - assuming biology ever took hold on Mars.
[....] Before sealing this cylinder, however, the rover will image the contents. It was at this stage in early August during the first sampling attempt that Perseverance scientists realised they had nothing in the tube; the coring mechanism had shattered the rock to a powder that then fell back on to the ground around the drill hole.
Now scientists have to wait and see which happens first: return of rock samples to Earth, or SLS launch.
