NASA’s Perseverance rover continues accumulating Martian rocks.
The car-sized robotic simply snagged its fourth Red Planet rock pattern, drilling one other core from an intriguing stone that it first sampled a little over a week ago.
“A rock so nice, I sampled it twice! Just capped and sealed my fifth sample tube, with another piece from this interesting rock. I’m doubling up on samples at some high-priority targets like this one,” Perseverance rover workforce members wrote Wednesday (Nov. 24) via the mission’s official Twitter account, posting two pictures of the sampling operation as nicely.
Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos from NASA’s Perseverance rover
Perseverance landed in February on the ground of Mars’ Jezero Crater, which hosted a giant lake and a river delta billions of years in the past. The rover is attempting to find indicators of historic Mars life and accumulating dozens of samples, which a joint NASA-European Space Agency marketing campaign will haul to Earth, maybe as early as 2031.
Perseverance has sealed 5 pattern tubes to this point, because the above tweet notes. But a kind of tubes is empty: The first rock the robotic tried to pattern, again in August, proved to be exceptionally mushy, crumbling to bits that did not make it into the designated titanium tube.
The newly collected pattern comes from the identical rock that Perseverance drilled on Nov. 15. That stone is wealthy within the greenish mineral olivine, a magnesium iron silicate that makes up most of Earth’s higher mantle.
“There are several ideas among my science team about how it got there. Hypotheses are flying! Science rules,” the Perseverance workforce tweeted on Nov. 16, when it introduced the profitable assortment of pattern quantity three.
Perseverance could also be tens of millions of miles from its dwelling planet, however it’s not alone. The rover landed with a tiny robotic companion, a 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) helicopter named Ingenuity, which has demonstrated that aerial exploration is feasible on Mars.
Ingenuity is now performing scouting work for Perseverance. The little chopper has racked up 16 Red Planet flights to this point, the latest of which took place on Sunday (Nov. 21).
Mike Wall is the creator of “Out There” (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a e book concerning the seek for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or on Facebook.
