NASA's Perseverance rover collected this tube's sample from a Mars region rich in organics. Scientists soon will scrutinize tubes like this for signatures of life.
Perseverance Mars rover to start caching samples for future return to Earth
However the tubes get delivered, a spacecraft will launch them to space and hand the samples off to a waiting orbiter to return the Martian samples to Earth. Aside from a fewcarved off of Mars that fell onto our planet, the historic shipment will represent the first time Red Planet rocks have made it to Earth.
The first sample to hit the regolith is roughly the size of a piece of chalk, collected from an igneous rock nicknamed"Malay" on Jan. 31 in a region called"South Séítah." South Séítah is itself significant; scientists announced weeks before taking the sample that they hadThe car-sized Perseverance took about an hour to spit out the tube from its belly, where the sampling and caching system resides.
Engineers tested the tube-flattening procedure with a Perseverance-like rover inside the"Mars yard," an adapted sandbox at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California where machines are tested in conditions similar to the Red Planet. Upright deposits happened about five percent of the time in these simulations, which is why the mission has backup.
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