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Littering an Alien World: Perseverance Rover Shows Map of Where It Stashed Mars Samples

There are many things the latest rover to reach Mars has been tasked with doing on location. Perseverance needs to look for signs of past microbial life there, determine the past habitability of the planet, and even produce some oxygen to see if there’s any merit to all that colonization and even terraforming talk. But perhaps its most important mission requires it to make quite a mess of the place.
Location of the ten titanium tubes Perseverance dropped on Mars 16 photos
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS
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Aside from all of the above, the NASA rover is also an important platform for testing new technologies and procedures. First, it helped launch the Ingenuity mini-helicopter, proving once and for all that powered flight inside Mars’ atmosphere is possible. Then, it started gathering samples of the alien world in light of a future mission expected to get up there, retrieve said samples and bring them back to Earth.

Mars Sample Return is the name of said mission, and it’s scheduled to launch in stages starting in the year 2027, when the Earth Return Orbiter will depart for Mars. That’s a ship meant to remain in Martian orbit, and once it gets hold of them, actually transport the samples back to Earth.

The following year, in 2028, the lander will leave for Mars. That’s the tech meant to snatch Perseverance’s samples, load them inside an ascent vehicle, and send them up to the Return Orbiter for their final journey.

All of this would have been in vain had Perseverance, recently appointed as sample retrieving rover, not lived up to expectations. It did, and at the end of January, the team running this show announced the rover had completed setting up its first “Mars sample depot.”

Mars Sample Return animation video
Photo: NASA JPL
The rover has been drilling and picking up samples for the past six weeks, and the first sample depot comprises no less than ten small titanium tubes (they are just 7 inches/18.6 cm long).

Eight of them contain samples of Martian rock and regolith, one has a piece of the Martian atmosphere inside it, and the tenth is a so-called witness tube. It basically means it came pre-loaded with materials that will be used to determine if and how much the other samples have been contaminated by Earthly organic or inorganic materials potentially taken up there by the rover itself.

As soon as it collected samples, Perseverance dropped the tubes behind it in a zigzag pattern and at distances of between 15 and 50 feet (5 and 15 meters). Such a distance between tubes gives future machines enough room to recover them safely, but also allows scientists here on Earth to properly mark their location. You know, just in case a mammoth sandstorm the likes of the one back in 2018, which effectively killed the Opportunity rover, takes place again.

You can see a sort of map of where each tube is located in the main photo of this piece, color-adjusted to appear just like the surface of the planet would appear to the human eye. It’s a panorama stitched together from 368 photos Perseverance snapped while on this mission, with the location of each tube clearly indicated. Each tube has its own name (Atsah, Skyland, Bearwallow, Coulettes, Roubion, Mageik, Malay, Crosswind Lake, Montdenier, and Amalik), but the meaning behind them was not yet explained by the American space agency.

Mars Sample Return animation video
Photo: NASA JPL
Everything you’re looking at now is just the backup sample depot. Every time it went to drill “rocks the mission team deems scientifically significant,” the rover filled two tubes with identical samples. The pair for each of the tubes you see spread on the surface of the Red Planet is located inside the rover itself. It is these ones carried by Perseverance that are the primaries, if you will, the ones that will make the actual trip to our home world.

The ones on the ground are the backups, and they’ll be retrieved in case something happens to Perseverance and the mission cannot proceed as initially planned.

Although Mars has been a prime target of our study as soon our technological level allowed us to look beyond the horizon of our planet, the Mars Sample Return mission is perhaps the most important ever devised, as it actually brings us bits of the neighboring planet right in our labs.

NASA is in the process of setting up the facilities and procedures to handle the samples and announced earlier in January the creation of a Mars Sample Receiving Project office at the Johnson Space Center. It’s there where the samples will be first taken, and from there, they’ll be distributed to laboratories across the world.

What most of us hope to learn from said samples goes far beyond the declared NASA goal, which is to get “an excellent cross-section of the geologic processes that took place in Jezero shortly after the crater’s formation almost 4 billion years ago." What most of us hope for is confirmation that life can exist in other worlds.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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