After collecting a dozen pinkie-size rock samples over its 18 months on Mars, the Perseverance rover has a message for planetary scientists.
A plan to deposit titanium sample tubes on the floor of Jezero crater will be revealed next week at a Mars community workshop. If NASA approves the plan, the rover will be able to start dropping samples as soon as November, assembling a cache that will be used to retrieve the first rocks from another planet. The Mars Sample Return mission would use a small rocket to send rocks to a special facility on Earth by 2033. It is possible for laboratory researchers to follow up on the rover's finding that many samples are made by living things.
The sample cache is part of the backup plan. Plan A is for the rover to carry a larger set of samples in its belly as it continues its scientific treasure hunt and deliver them to the return rocket. Researchers don't want to be left empty-handed if the rover fails A planetary mineralogist at the Open University calls it an insurance policy. We have the option to pick it up once we have that cache.
Establishing the backup cache is a milestone for the rover team, which shows how the dream of Mars scientists for a generation is getting closer to reality. Ken Farley is a project scientist at the California Institute of Technology and a member of the rover mission. The thing is getting real. There is an inventory of rocks from the 13 kilometers of exploration that the rover did.
Some come from lava flows, a surprising and welcome discovery for rover scientists who were expecting to find mostly lakebed sediments. There are radioactive elements in these rocks. Earth-based laboratories can use the clock provided by their decay to date the moment when the rocks break. Some of the volcanic rocks are thought to have been laid down before the river, so they could give time to flow.
Lab tools can be used to detect ancient magnetic fields. meteorites from the planet show traces of an ancient field. Water could have escaped to space if it had been lost. The theory could be strengthened by dating when the magnetic field disappeared, according to Tanja.
There are signs of ancient life in the volcanic rock. Perseverance has found carbonates and sulfates in some of the rocks. French is a member of theMSR campaign science group and says that there are water-rock interactions that could create hydrogen and methane.
The main attraction in the quest for past life is the river delta. The muds could be chemical. They could be physical, as the silt particles coalesced over time. The cell gets sealed away from degrading processes.
The cliff at the edge of the delta is 40 meters tall. The highest concentration of aromatics the rover has ever seen was found in a fine grained mudstone.
It's possible that living things made those molecule. Chris Herd, a planetary geologist on the rover team at the University ofAlberta, said that researchers will want to see if they have more of the light isotope of carbon that life prefers. Evidence of metabolism is what we're looking for. The tough lipid molecule that can form cell walls is one of the clearest signs of old life. She says you want an outline of a cell. lipids can persist, even though you won't find anything.
Before dropping the backup cache, Rover managers would like to add a few more samples. They plan to drill next week at a site called Enchanted Lake, which has the potential to be the finest grained delta rock of all time. A sample of wind-deposited soil will be collected by the rover after that. There is a chance that we will get a sample of the fine-grained dust on Mars. A tube containing nothing but air is an important resource for those studying the martian atmosphere.
The sample tubes will be discharged once the rover team completes its cache and NASA approves the plan. They won't be dropped in a pile. The rover will deposit them one by one in a flat area of the crater. Meenakshi is the principal scientist at Arizona State University. It is as good as it gets when it comes to landing a sample mission.
The current plans call for a pair of autonomously piloted helicopter to collect individual samples and carry them to the 3-meter tall rocket that will launch them into space. He doesn't worry about finding the tubes. We will be able to see where they are within a few centimeters.
The backup cache might never make it to Earth if the rover is healthy. The cache will be a motivator to go ahead with the rest of the scheme and make sure it works. It is sending a message that this is a returnable set of samples.
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