After the Perseverance rover deposited its first rock-filled tube on the martian surface, NASA took a major step forward in getting Mars samples back to Earth.
The sample was deposited on December 21 by Perseverance.
One small drop is what NASA calls the rover mission.
Perseverance will place nine more titanium tubes at the same location as it builds a sample depot for NASA.
There are duplicate samples of each one thatPerseverance keeps at the depot.
Perseverance will attempt to deliver its samples to a robotic lander on the Mars Sample Return mission. The landers will use its robotic arm to transfer the tubes to the capsule. A rocket will blast off into the martian skies and deliver the collection to a spaceship which will take them to Earth.
Sample Recovery Helicopters, based on the design of NASA's Mars-based Ingenuity aircraft, will fly to the depot if Perseverance isn't able to deliver its samples.
Once they reach Earth, the samples will undergo detailed analysis to help us learn more about how Mars evolved. Scientists might be able to learn more about how life evolved here on Earth.
The first sample left at the depot is informally known as Malay. It was gathered from a region of Jezero Crater.
It took almost an hour forPerseverance to retrieve the metal tube from inside the rover, view it one last time with its internal cache cam, and drop the sample onto a carefully selected patch of martian surface.
JPL engineers used the Perseverance camera on the robot arm to make sure the tube didn't roll into the path of the rover's wheels. It hadn't.
The prime mission period for Perseverance ends on January 6 and seeing the first sample on the ground is a great way to end it. The first chapter of the mission is being closed just as we start our cache.
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