The Perseverance rover, from NASAwhich is currently located on the outskirts of the Jezero crater, from Marsdeposited its first sample on the surface of another planet, with the expectation that a yet-to-be-produced spacecraft would return to the red planet and collect the tubes in the next decade.
NASA indicated that the Percy robot was about to build “the first sample repository of the humanity in an other planet🇧🇷 The sample was collected on January 31 of this year and is informally known as “Malay”.
advertising
Read more:
The sample is roughly the size of a piece of plaster and is protected from the harsh Martian environment with a titanium tube. Persistence kept him safe all year until he fell about three feet off the Martian floor.
“Seeing our first earth sample is a great culmination to our prime mission period,” Rick Welch, deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are developing a lander specially designed to take samples from the robot’s belly, load them onto a rocket and launch them from Mars to Earth. The mission is expected to return to our planet only in the early 2030s.
Not everything is flowers
However, there are some contingencies. If Perseverance can’t get to the lander and deliver the samples, the backup plan is to collect the deposited samples with a couple of helicopters. In the coming weeks, Percy is expected to release more champions before his main quest period, which ends on January 6, 2023.
“It’s a good idea that just as we’re starting our ‘cache,’ we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission,” Welch said.
The collection of samples will reveal more about the Martian geology and climate and help look for signs of microbes that once existed on the red planet.
There are multiple countries in the project
NASA isn’t the only hopeful of bringing back new samples from Mars. Japan’s space agency also hopes to collect Martian samples. The MMX mission intends to land on Mars’ moon Phobos and return the samples to Earth before the end of the decade.
With information from CNET
Presentation image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Have you seen the new videos on Youtube of the digital gaze? Subscribe to the channel!
