After collecting a dozen pinkie-size rock samples over its 18 months on Mars, the Perseverance rover has a message for planetary scientists: Your order is ready for pickup.
Next week, at a Mars community workshop, mission managers will reveal a plan to deposit 10 or 11 of the titanium sample tubes on the floor of Jezero crater, which held a lake billions of years ago. If NASA officials endorse the plan, the rover could begin to drop the samples as soon as November, assembling a cache that will play a key role in an ambitious plan to retrieve the first rocks from another planet.
Some come from lava flows, a surprising and welcome discovery for rover scientists who were expecting to find mostly lakebed sediments on the crater floor. These igneous rocks contain radioactive elements such as uranium. Their decay provides a clock that Earth-based labs can use to date the moment when the rocks crystallized.
In the quest for past life, however, the fossilized river delta has always been the main attraction because of how sediments might preserve telltale signs. Those could be chemical: organic molecules adsorbed on clay minerals in the muds. They could even be physical: microbial fossils entombed as silt particles got cemented together over time. “The cell effectively gets sealed away from the processes that would degrade it,” Bosak says.
Rover managers want to add a few more samples to their collection before they drop the backup cache. Next week, they plan to drill at a site called Enchanted Lake, which has the potential to provide the finest grained delta rock of all. Soon after that, the rover will collect a sample of wind-deposited soil, which “integrates” information from across all of Mars, says Katie Stack Morgan, the mission’s deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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