Like Perseverance a rover drilled Wednesday into a rock to collect a sample of Jezero crater on Mars, Justin Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, felt nervous and excited. He has the honor of serving as a “sample shepherd,” leading the effort millions of miles away, but the pressure continues. “These samples will not only allow us to understand the geology of the crater, but also minerals related to the history of water,” he said yesterday.
But first, the rover had to actually capture a piece of rock in a test-sized container. A first attempt in early August had been left empty. That first rock, nicknamed “Roubion,” simply crumbled to dust as the drill ventured toward it, and none of these pieces made it into the container.
Simon can now breathe a sigh of relief. Perseverance’s second attempt, with a different rock, seems to have successfully extracted a Martian nucleus slightly thicker than a pencil.
“We have the image of a spectacular-looking core, a fantastic-looking cylinder, clearly broken. It looks geologically very interesting, something that scientists of the future will enjoy working on, ”says Ken Farley, a Caltech geochemist and scientist on the Perseverance mission project, which is run by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
But the analysis of the new sample will take a while, because NASA scientists have not been able to get clear photographs due to low lighting conditions, which makes the images difficult to interpret. . To add more drama to the scientists, when Perseverance did a “percussion to ingest” procedure, he shook the sample to make sure the tube didn’t overfill, which would cause the system to jam when stored. empty sample tube. (They’re pretty sure they got the sample, but they’ll try to take more pictures in better light over the next two days.)
Perseverance’s first attempt to drill, which essentially pulverized the sample, was not a complete failure, as it gave evidence suggesting that the rock had been resisted, worn by a river that flowed into the crater of the lake billions ago. of years. “It had always been possible for this lake to be a transient event, like perhaps a comet, rich in water, to reach Mars and make lakes, and then boil or freeze in decades. But that would not produce weathering. that we see, ”Farley said in an interview earlier this week.
Since that rock was too dusty, the scientists flew the rover to a new area, looking for a different type of rock to test, using the Ingenuity helicopter to explore ahead. Perseverance shifted slightly to the west, where on a ridge line the researchers found a larger, rock-like rock, which they called “Rochette” and which seemed less likely to disintegrate when the rover deployed his tools. “It looks like a rock that, if it could be thrown, would fall to the ground. A good, healthy rock, ”said Farley.
Before each sampling attempt, Perseverance performs the reconnaissance by taking photographs of a candidate rock. Last weekend, he also performed an abrasion test to see if Rochette was tough enough for the show. The rover is equipped with a rotary percussion drill (with additional drill bits) that rotates and hammers into the rock. This tool helps to remove dust and crush through the weathered outer layer. According to Farley, the abrasion was a spectacular success, so the scientists decided to continue taking a sample. Perseverance extended the 7-foot-long robotic arm, fired the drill, and carefully extracted a central sample. He then rotated the “hand” of the arm so that the sample tube could be inspected.