The Perseverance rover has captured its first two slices of Mars.
NASA’s newest Mars rover drilled right into a flat rock nicknamed Rochette on September 1 and crammed a roughly finger-sized tube with stone. The pattern is the primary ever destined to be despatched again to Earth for additional research. On September 7, the rover snagged a second pattern from the identical rock. Each are actually saved in hermetic tubes contained in the rover’s physique.
Getting pairs of samples from each rock it drills is “slightly little bit of an insurance coverage coverage,” says deputy venture scientist Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. It means the rover can drop similar shops of samples in two completely different locations, boosting possibilities {that a} future mission will have the ability to decide up at the least one set.
The profitable drilling is a comeback story for Perseverance. The rover’s first try to take a little bit of Mars ended with the pattern crumbling to mud, leaving an empty tube (SN: 8/19/21). Scientists suppose that rock was too smooth to carry as much as the drill.
Signal Up For the Newest from Science Information
Headlines and summaries of the most recent Science Information articles, delivered to your inbox
Thanks for signing up!
There was an issue signing you up.
However, the rover persevered.
“Though a few of its rocks aren’t, Mars is difficult,” stated Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, in a September 10 information briefing.
Rochette is a tough rock that seems to have been much less severely eroded by millennia of Martian climate (SN: 7/14/20). (Enjoyable reality: All of the rocks Perseverance drills into will get names associated to nationwide parks; the area on Mars the rover is now exploring is known as Mercantour, so the title Rochette — or “Little Rock” — comes from a village in France close to Mercantour Nationwide Park.)
Rover measurements of the rock’s texture and chemistry means that it’s product of basalt and should have been a part of an historic lava circulation. That’s helpful as a result of volcanic rocks protect their ages effectively, Stack Morgan says. When scientists on Earth get their fingers on the pattern, they’ll have the ability to use the concentrations of sure components and isotopes to determine precisely how outdated the rock is — one thing that’s by no means been performed for a pristine Martian rock.
Rochette additionally incorporates salt minerals that most likely shaped when the rock interacted with water over very long time intervals. That might counsel groundwater shifting via the Martian subsurface, perhaps creating liveable environments inside the rocks, Stack Morgan says.
“It actually appears like this wealthy treasure trove of data for once we get this pattern again,” Stack Morgan says.
As soon as a future mission brings the rocks again to Earth, scientists can search inside these salts for tiny fluid bubbles that is perhaps trapped there. “That might give us a glimpse of Jezero crater on the time when it was moist and was in a position to maintain historic Martian life,” stated planetary scientist Yulia Goreva of JPL on the information briefing.
Scientists should be affected person, although — the earliest any samples will make it again to Earth is 2031. However it’s nonetheless a historic milestone, says planetary scientist Meenakshi Wadhwa of Arizona State College in Tempe.
“These signify the start of Mars pattern return,” stated Wadhwa stated on the information briefing. “I’ve dreamed of getting samples again from Mars to investigate in my lab since I used to be a graduate scholar. We’ve talked about Mars pattern return for many years. Now it’s beginning to truly really feel actual.”
