NASA scientists were quite excited in early August when the Perseverance rover indicated that it had drilled its first sample of Martian rock. But, as it turned out, the the sample tube was empty, and the Perseverance team began a remote investigation to solve the mystery of the disappearing rock.
Kenneth Farley, a project scientist at the California Institute of Technology and a member of the Perseverance team, outlined the next steps of the mission in a blog post published late last week. The target of the rock in question, nicknamed Roubion, crumbled powder while the rover drilled into it. The target was a flat stone, which was part of the stretch of the Jezero Crater, which NASA scientists believe could contain some of the oldest information about the bed of the dried-up lake; if there is no evidence of fossil life, the rock sample would contain at least information about the ancient climate and geological history of the red planet.
Because the white, polygonal flat stone turned out to be unsuitable for sampling, Farley said the team has pivoted toward “rocks as different as possible … to allow us to test the idea that Roubion was just a rock of misconduct “. The next target is Citadelle, an outcrop of a half-mile rocky ridge in the crater. Citadelle pebbles are a very different type of fairing project from the thin-layer sediment of the Crater Floor-Fractured Rough.
Farley said the team will likely select a sampling target at Citadelle and begin planning the fairing this week, with the goal of sampling the outcrop in late August. If this attempt is successful, the Citadelle rock will be the first of dozens of samples to be extracted from the Martian surface. NASA plans that these samples will eventually be collected by another mission and brought to Earth in the early 2030s. All in all, this mission would be one of the most ambitious in the recent history of space exploration and certainly in the history of Martian exploration. If the samples are successfully brought to Earth, they will be the farthest objects from the collected space for humanity.
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After Citadelle, there are a couple of items that are already in the Perseverance log. The rover is scheduled to check the details of the Séitah, a strip of crater dunes, and must finally reach the delta that attaches to the crater, a place that researchers believe is most promising in terms of potential astrobiology. (This hope is based on where primordial microororganisms tend to emerge on Earth, drying out delta river is the Martian analogue.)
But before Perseverance reached the delta, Farley said the rover could go back to the dirty fracture and try to burn it again. There is a possibility that Perseverance will end up having bad luck with a particularly stubborn rock, he said, and added that the rocks of the same region as stirising from the ground could be more structurally solid and therefore better sampling targets.
The entire Perseverance mission is expected to last two years, so hopefully the first sampling attempt is just a mistake. race to Mars.