During Beta testing articles may only be saved for seven days. Create a list of articles to read later. You will be able to access your list from any article in Discover. After a false start last month during which the Perseverance rover managed to take a rock sample but then lost it, scientists have now succeeded in successfully collecting a piece of Mars.
This is the first rock sample ever to be collected from the red planet and will hopefully be followed by dozens more. The rover drilled into the surface of the planet and obtained its first sample of rock. In the coming days, new images will be under better sunlight conditions will confirm if the sample has been successfully collected, after which it will be safely deposited it in a collection tube where it will remain until it is retrieved from Mars at a later date.
Two of the primary aims of the NASA Mars mission are to reconstruct the landscape of Jezero crater and to look for signs of ancient life that may have flourished on the now arid planet.
The rocks date to 3. The Jezero crater is also thought to have once been the site of a river delta on the surface of Mars. If the planet supported life in the past, then it is in these ancient waters that scientists think that it may have lived.
He is one of 15 international Returned Sample Science Participating Scientists RSS-PSs on the mission who will lead the science team in its effort to figure out which rocks the rover will collect and returned to Earth for future research. The Perseverance rover is just the first part of a long-term sample return mission.
The rover will collect the rock samples, store them in tubes, and eventually deposit them on the surface of Mars. In a few years' time, scientists will send another craft to Mars, which will pick up these samples and return them to Earth.
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Call Us: Skip to content. What Is Perseverance? Shop Monroe Aerospace. More Popular Posts. November 12, Products. The sample-gathering path Perseverance will take. Another aspect of these rock cores that could mean what is now a barren crater existed as an actual lake is the changes they have gone through. There are salts in these rocks that probably formed when groundwater evaporated and left the salts behind most likely or groundwater interacted with them and changed the composition of minerals within the rock less likely.
Even more amazing is that there might be micro-bubbles of Martian water still trapped in these salts. Because salts preserve signs of life so well on Earth, they might also have done so on Mars.
It is unlikely the lake that is now Jezero Crater was just the result of a flash flood that dried up in a few decades.
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