The package of instruments known as SuperCam aboard the Perseverance Mars rover has collected its first samples in the hunt for life spent on the red planet, mission scientists said Wednesday.
The return to Earth in a few years of the rocks and soil it will recover “will give scientists the Holy Grail of planetary exploration,” Jean-Yves le Gall, president of the National Center for Space Studies (CNES) of France, who built mainly the mobile observatory, commented through a YouTube broadcast.
These “pieces of Mars,” he said, may “finally answer this fascinating and fundamental question: was there ever life anywhere other than Earth?”
After seven months in space, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed gently on Martian land last month and sent black-and-white images revealing the rocky fields of Jezero Crater, just north of the equator. Mart.
“The critical component of this astrobiology mission is SuperCam,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy head of NASA’s scientific mission.
Mounted on the rover’s mast, the shoe box-sized device is packed with spectrometers, a laser, and an audio recording device to analyze the chemistry, mineralogy, and molecular composition of Mars ’famous red surface.
The SuperCam laser can launch objects smaller than a pencil point from up to seven meters (20 feet) and allows the observation of points out of range of the rover’s robotic arm.
“The laser is able to remotely clean surface dust, giving all its instruments a clear view of the targets,” said Roger Wiens, an engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and principal investigator at SuperCam.
The mission suffered a serious setback before departure, revealed Scott Robinson of LANL, who said more than 500 engineers and scientists contributed to the project.
“The optics of the stick unit were destroyed in a strange accident just four months before delivery,” he explained. “The team struggled to gather spare parts to rebuild the telescope from scratch.”
The accident turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
A “strange accident”
Upon reassembling the unit, the engineers discovered what Robinson described as a “Hubble-like” defect in the original mirror.
Shortly after the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, operators realized that the observatory’s primary mirror had an aberration (later corrected) that affected the clarity of the images.
Scientists believe that about 3.5 billion years ago the crater in which perseverance landed housed a river that flowed into a deep lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
The rover has the task of collecting more than two dozen samples of rock and soil in sealed tubes, to be sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for analysis.
SuperCam is also taking close-up shots of rock targets on Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / LANL / CNES / CNRS / ASU / MSSS)
As for the size and weight of an SUV, Perseverance is equipped with a two-meter (seven-foot) robotic arm, 19 cameras, two microphones and other cutting-edge instruments.
A small helicopter drone tucked under its belly will attempt the first motorized flight from another planet in a few weeks.
An instrument on board is designed to make oxygen from the atmosphere mainly from carbon dioxide on Mars, which would greatly facilitate human habitation.
Perseverance is the fifth rover that puts wheels on Mars, all from NASA. The feat was first performed in 1997.
Its main mission lasts just over two years, but the rover could continue to operate much further.
© France-Presse Agency