Perseverance will leave 10 tubes of Martian rock and other materials at a safe drop spot for possible trip off the Red PLanet.
Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechAs early as next week, the Perseverance rover could start dropping ten test-tube-size cores of rock and dirt onto the ground of Jezero Crater, Mars. Perseverance has been collecting the cores since, and it has accumulated a range of scientifically intriguing samples.Depositing the cores is an early step toward the first-ever Mars sample return.
The Martian site nicknamed Three Forks, where the Perseverance rover will soon deposit a cache of samples.Perseverance will deposit the tubes at the base of an ancient river delta in Jezero, in a flat area called Three Forks, where it should be easy for future spacecraft to land. The contents of the ten tubes include, which scientists think will offer the best chance of finding evidence of past life on Mars.
The depot will also include four crater-floor samples of igneous rocks, which are volcanically derived rocks that will allow researchers back on Earth to determine, for the first time, the absolute age of rocks from a particular place on Mars. Rounding out the collection will be one sample of Martian dirt, one of the Martian atmosphere and one ‘witness tube’ that will show whether Earth contaminants were present during sample collection.
At Three Forks, Perseverance will put the ten tubes between 6 and 15 metres apart on the surface, says Katie Stack Morgan, the rover’s deputy project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. That’s to make sure there is enough room for tiny wheeled helicopters to roll up next to them, pick them up and fly them over to the future fetch lander.
After the rover lays down the ten tubes, it will still have 25 empty tubes on board for whatever it might encounter in the years to come.
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