NASA’s Perseverance rover is getting set to lighten its load just a little on the Purple Planet.
Perseverance landed inside Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021 to hunt for indicators of historical Purple Planet life and accumulate samples for future return to Earth. The car-sized rover has drilled out 14 Mars rock cores so far — two apiece from seven goal stones — and it’ll doubtless drop half of them in November or December, stated mission group member Jim Bell of Arizona State College.
That is the alternative of carelessness; it is a safeguard designed to guard the general Mars sample-return venture, which is a joint effort of NASA and the European Area Company (ESA). The baseline plan requires Perseverance to ship its samples to a NASA lander that sports activities a built-in rocket, which is able to launch the Mars materials to orbit. An ESA-provided orbiter will then snag the samples and haul them again to Earth. They may land right here as quickly as 2033.
Associated: 12 wonderful pictures from the Perseverance rover’s 1st 12 months on Mars
The lander, Mars rocket and ESA orbiter are at present scheduled to launch within the 2027-2028 timeframe. Perseverance is in good well being, however there’s an opportunity the rover will not be doing so effectively when that different {hardware} arrives on the Purple Planet. Therefore the approaching depot drop, which is able to contain one pattern from every drilled rock. (Perseverance will maintain the opposite pattern set onboard.)
“That is our backup pattern cache, simply in case the rover itself cannot ship samples,” Bell, the principal investigator for Persevance’s Mastcam-Z camera system, stated throughout a livestreamed presentation Thursday (Oct. 20) on the 2022 Mars Society Conference.
The NASA sample-return lander will carry two small helicopters, every of them modeled on Ingenuity, the little rotorcraft that landed on Jezero’s flooring with Perseverance final 12 months and has aced greater than 30 Purple Planet flights since. If want be, the 2 choppers will carry pattern tubes, one after the other, from the depot — or depots, as there may find yourself being multiple — to the lander. (“Depot” is a barely overgrand time period for a spot the place tubes can be mendacity within the dust.)
The depot Perseverance will set up within the subsequent month or two is at a web site dubbed Three Forks, which Bell stated is a “fairly flat space.” The topography is due to this fact favorable for protected helicopter landings and liftoffs.
Perseverance has some work to do earlier than it might head over to Three Forks, nonetheless. It is at present amassing regolith — samples of Martian sand and mud — and can doubtless proceed doing so via subsequent week, Bell stated.
Perseverance carries a complete of 43 titanium tubes, 38 of that are designed to carry samples. The opposite 5 are “witness tubes” that may assist mission group members decide which supplies, if any, in collected Martian samples could also be contaminants from Earth.
The rover has crammed 15 of its sampling tubes so far, 14 of them with drilled rock cores (although the group is having hassle sealing up the tube with essentially the most lately collected core). The opposite crammed tube accommodates an “atmospheric pattern” — Martian air however nothing else, the results of a drilling effort that went awry because of a surprisingly crumbly rock.
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There (opens in new tab)” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e-book concerning the seek for alien life. Observe him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in new tab). Observe us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or on Fb (opens in new tab).
