Mars has been a hive of activity since February 2021. Both NASA and the Chinese National Space Administration currently have rovers on the surface of the red planet.
Today we’re sharing news about NASA’s most recent arrival on Mars, Perseverance.
The space exploration agency says that the Perseverance team has achieved its goal of successfully coring a Martian rock through the use of its Sampling and Caching System. This is the second time the system has been used since Perseverance arrived on Mars.
This system uses a rotary-percussive drill fitted with a hollow coring bit at the end of a 2m long robotic arm. This hollow bit allows the team to place the sample into a sample tube which can then be imaged by Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z.
As you might suspect, getting a sample of rock as thin as a pencil into a sample tube isn’t easy, especially when you’re doing that from another planet.
“The initial set of images from Mastcam-Z showed the end of a cored rock within the sample tube. After taking these images, the rover began a procedure called ‘percuss to ingest,’ which vibrates the drill bit and tube for one second, five separate times. The movement is designed to clear the lip of the sample tube of any residual material. The action can also cause a sample to slide down farther into the tube. After the rover finished the percuss-to-ingest procedure, it took a second set of Mastcam-Z images. In these images, the lighting is poor, and internal portions of the sample tube are not visible,” explained NASA.
This means that NASA has to wait for better light so that it can capture more images before it can be sealed and stored.
Those photos are expected to be taken today (Friday 3rd September) and should arrive at Earth by Saturday morning.
As for the samples, while they will remain on Mars for now, future missions in co-operation with the European Space Agency could see spacecraft sent to the red planet to collect these sample and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
