Less than six weeks after it began, the construction of the first sample depot on another world is complete. Confirmation that NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover had successfully dropped the 10th and final tube planned for the depot was received around 5 p.m. PST (8 p.m. EST) on Sunday, January 29 by mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. This major milestone involved precise planning and navigation to ensure the tubes could be safely recovered in the future by the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign, which aims to bring samples of Mars to Earth for closer study.
During its science campaigns, the rover has taken a few samples from rocks that the mission team considers scientifically significant. One sample from each pair collected so far now lies in a carefully arranged depot in the “Three Forks” area of ​​the Lake Crater. The storage samples will serve as a backup set, while the other half will remain in Perseverance, which would be the primary means of delivering samples to the lander for campaign sample acquisition.
Mission scientists believe the igneous and sedimentary rock cores provide an excellent cross-section of the geological processes that took place in the Lake shortly after the crater formed nearly 4 billion years ago. The rover also stored an atmospheric sample and what’s called a “witness” tube, which is used to determine whether the collected samples may be contaminated by materials that traveled with the rover from Earth.
Titanium tubes were placed on the surface in a complex zigzag pattern, with each sample spaced about 15 to 50 feet (5 to 15 meters) apart to ensure they could be safely retrieved. To add time to the depot creation process, the team needed to precisely map the location of each 7-inch (18.6-centimeter-long) tube-glove (adapter) combination so that the samples could be found, even when covered in dust. . The depot is located on level ground near the base of a raised fan-shaped ancient river delta that was formed long ago when the river flowed into the lake there.
“With the Three Forks repository in our rearview mirror, Perseverance is now headed for the Delta,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance deputy project manager at JPL. “We will ascend the ‘Hawksbill Gap’ route that we explored earlier. Once we pass the geological unit that the science team calls ‘Rocky Top,’ we’ll be in new territory and begin exploring the top of the Delta.”
Another scientific campaign
Passing through the rocky peak marks the end of the rover’s Delta Front campaign and the beginning of the rover’s Delta Top campaign due to the geological transition that takes place at this level.
“We found that from the base of the delta up to where Rocky Top is, the rocks appear to have been deposited in a lake environment,” said Ken Farley, Perseverance Project Scientist at Caltech. “And the ones just above Rocky Peak appear to have been formed in, or at the end of, a Martian river that flows into a lake. As we ascend the delta into a fluvial environment, we expect to move into rocks that are composed of larger grains—from sand to large boulders. These materials probably came from rocks outside the Lake, eroded, and then washed into the crater.
One of the first stops the rover will make during the new science campaign is a site the science team calls “Curvilinear Unit.” The unit is essentially Martian sand and is made of sediment that was deposited many years ago in a bend in one of the river channels in the Lake. The science team believes the sinuous unit will be an excellent place to hunt for interesting sandstone and possibly mudstone outcrops and to gain insight into the geological processes behind the Jezero crater walls.
More about the mission
A key focus of the Perseverance mission on Mars is astrobiology, including depositing samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and preserve Martian rock and regolith. Subsequent missions by NASA, in collaboration with ESA, will send a spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s lunar exploration approach to Mars, which includes the Artemis lunar missions to help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. JPL, managed by Caltech for NASA, built and operates the Perseverance rover.
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Reference : https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-s-perseverance-rover-completes-mars-sample-depot
