NASA confirms Perseverance Mars rover obtained its first piece of rock

NASA has confirmed that its Perseverance rover has succeeded in collecting its first rock pattern on Mars.

“I’ve got it!” the space agency tweeted within the early hours of Monday, alongside {a photograph} of a rock core barely thicker than a pencil inside a sample tube.

NASA mentioned final week it thought it had achieved the feat, however poorly-lit images taken by the rover meant that the group working the mission weren’t sure whether or not the pattern had stayed inside its tube.

It needed to retake the images in higher lighting, however sending again the info can take a number of days.

“With better lighting down the sample tube, you can see the rock core I collected is still in there,” mentioned NASA within the new tweet, including that the following stage can be sealing this tube and storing it.

The goal was a briefcase-sized rock nicknamed “Rochette” from a ridgeline that’s half a mile (900 meters) lengthy.

Perseverance makes use of a drill and a hole coring bit on the finish of its 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm to extract samples.

After coring the rock, the rover vibrated the drill bit and tube for one second, 5 separate occasions.

This process known as “percuss to ingest” and is supposed to clear the lip of the tube of residual materials, and trigger the pattern to slip down the tube.

Perseverance landed on an historic lake mattress known as the Jezero Crater in February, on a mission to seek for indicators of historic microbial life utilizing a collection of refined devices mounted on its turret.

It can be attempting to raised characterize the Red Planet’s geology and previous local weather.

Eventually NASA desires to gather samples taken by the rover in a joint mission with the European Space Agency, someday within the 2030s.

Its first try at taking a pattern in August failed after the rock was too crumbly to resist the robotic’s drill.

© 2021 AFP