Tread marks are left on the ground of Jezero Crater on Mars, while the NASA Perseverance rover first circulates on the Martian surface on March 4, 2021. The rover is collecting samples to return to Earth. (NASA / JPL-Caltech via Reuters)
LOS ANGELES – NASA’s exploratory scientist on Mars, Perseverance, has collected and hidden the first of many samples of minerals that the US space agency hopes to retrieve from the surface of the red planet for analysis on Earth.
Tools connected to Perseverance and operated by mission specialists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles pierced a rock core slightly thicker than a pencil from an old Martian lake bed, and sealed it. hermetically in a titanium specimen tube inside the rover.
The feat, carried out on September 1 and publicly confirmed by NASA on Monday at the end, was the first mineral sample of its kind obtained from the surface of another planet, according to the space agency.
NASA chief and former astronaut Bill Nelson hailed it as “a momentous success.”
The space agency plans to collect up to 43 samples of minerals over the next few months from the ground of Jerez Crater, a vast basin where scientists think water flowed and microbial life may have blossomed billions of years ago. years.
The SUV-sized six-wheeled vehicle is also expected to explore the sediment walls deposited at the foot of a remnant river delta once engraved in a corner of the crater and considered an ideal place to study.
The mineral collection is at the heart of the $ 2.7 billion Perseverance project.
Two future missions to Mars, which will be carried out jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency, are expected to retrieve these specimens in the next decade and return them to Earth, where astrobiologists will examine them for signs of small fossilized organisms. .
These fossils would represent the first conclusive evidence that life has ever existed beyond Earth.
Perseverance, the fifth and much more sophisticated rover that NASA has sent to Mars since its first, Sojourner, arrived in 1997, landed in Jerez crater in February after a 293 million-mile flight from Earth.
The success of the first collection of samples, extracted from a briefcase-sized flat rock with the rotary-percussion drill at the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm, was verified by images taken by the rover’s cameras as the sample was measured, cataloged and stored, NASA said.
The rover’s interim 3,000-part interim caching sampling and storage system was described by JPL interim director Larry James as “the most complex mechanism ever sent into space.”