The sample tube, which is filled with rock, will be one of 10 forming a depot of tubes that the Mars Sample Return campaign could consider for a trip to Earth for in-depth analysis. On December 22, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover placed a titanium tube containing a rock sample on the Red Planet’s
But the job wasn’t done for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which built Perseverance and leads the mission. Once they confirmed the tube had dropped, the team positioned the
They also wanted to ensure the tube hadn’t landed in such a way that it was standing on its end . That occurred less than 5% of the time during testing with’s Mars Yard. In case it does happen on Mars, the mission has written a series of commands for Perseverance to carefully knock the tube over with part of the turret at the end of its robotic arm.
“Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great capstone to our prime mission period, which ends on Jan. 6,” said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at JPL. “It’s a nice alignment that, just as we’re starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission.”This short animation features key moments of NASA and ESA’s Mars Sample Return campaign, from landing on Mars and securing the sample tubes to launching them off the surface and ferrying them back to Earth.
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