NASA’s Perseverance rover has separated and safely put away its second sample of martian rock only days after its first successful collection.
The space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is administering the Mars mission, shared the news in a tweet on Wednesday, September 8.
“Two for two: I have successfully processed and stored my second sample of Mars, thus bringing my total to two Martian rock cores in one week,” reads a post on the Perseverance Twitter page that likewise includes pictures showing the drilled rock and collection tube with the material inside.
The accomplishment proposes JPL has at long last nailed the rover’s sample collection process following a failed effort in August when the loose consistency of the assembled material made it get out of the collection tube.
Thereafter, the JPL group guided Perseverance to one more rock with a more steady structure. Both stored samples have come from this rock, with the rover drilling out pieces about the size of a pencil prior to storing them in titanium tubes.
Perseverance will keep on drill material from various rocks during its investigation of Jezero Crater, a dried-up lake bed. While the rover will utilize its set-up of locally available instruments to inspect the samples, a later mission will expect to ship the take to Earth so researchers can utilize all the more impressive analytical tools to ideally find more with regards to the red planet and its history.
“Using the most sophisticated science instruments on Earth, we expect jaw-dropping discoveries across a broad set of science areas, including exploration into the question of whether life once existed on Mars,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science.
Perseverance arrived at Mars in February 2021 and from that point forward has been investigating the outer layer of the planet, sending back new imagery — and sound — as well as getting ready for its sample collections.
Dissimilar to NASA’s past rover missions, Perseverance carried with it a traveling friend as a drone like flying machine called Ingenuity, which in April became the first airplane to perform powered, controlled flight on another planet.
Ingenuity was sent as a test gadget to check whether such a machine could help future rovers plan their courses all the more efficiently and securely. Yet, the airplane’s various test flights have been going great to the point that Ingenuity itself has had the option to assist Perseverance with discovering its direction around the surface of Mars.
