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What’s hidden inside every rock and soil sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover is a potential boon for atmospheric scientists. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is collecting samples, including
What’s hidden inside every rock and soil sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover is a potential boon for atmospheric scientists.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is collecting samples, including rock cores and atmospheric gases, on Mars for later return to Earth. These samples could provide important information about the Martian atmosphere and its evolution, possibly revealing the existence of microbial life billions of years ago. Gas samples, in particular, could provide valuable clues about the planet’s trace gases and ancient climate, draw parallels to the history of Earth’s own atmosphere, and aid future human missions to Mars.
As NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover seals each rock core into titanium sample tubes, atmospheric researchers are getting more excited. These samples are being collected for further delivery to Earth as part of the Mars sample return campaign; Twenty-four have been received so far.
Many of these samples consist of rock cores or regolith (remains of rock and dust), which can reveal important information about the planet’s history and whether microbial life existed billions of years ago. But some scientists are equally excited about the possibility of studying “space”—the air in the extra chamber around the stone material in the pipes.
They want to learn more about the Martian atmosphere, which consists mostly of carbon dioxide but may also contain traces of other gases that may have existed since the planet’s formation.
“Air samples from Mars will tell us not only about the current climate and atmosphere, but also how they have changed over time,” said Brandy Carrier, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. “This will help us understand how climates different from our own change.”
Samples that could be sent to Earth include a tube filled with gas that only accumulated on the Martian surface as part of the sample repository. But much more of the gas in the rover’s collection is in rock samples. These are unique because the gas will interact with the rocky material inside the pipes for years until the samples are opened and analyzed in laboratories on Earth. The information scientists glean from them will shed light on how much water vapor is emitted near the surface of Mars, one of the factors that determine why ice forms where it forms on the planet, and how the Martian water cycle has evolved over time.
Scientists also want to better understand trace gases in the air on Mars. What will fascinate science most will be the discovery of noble gases (such as neon, argon and xenon) that are so inactive that they may have remained unchanged in the atmosphere since their formation billions of years ago. If captured, these gases could reveal whether Mars consists of an atmosphere. (Ancient Mars had a much thicker atmosphere than today, but scientists aren’t sure if it was always there or if it developed later.) There are also big questions about how the planet’s ancient atmosphere compares to early Earth’s.
The main field will also provide the ability to estimate the size and toxicity of dust particles, information that will help future astronauts on Mars.
“Gas samples have a lot to offer Martian scientists,” said Justin Simon, a geochemist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and part of a group of more than a dozen international experts who helped decide which samples the rover should collect. “Even non-Mars scientists will be interested because it will shed light on how planets form and evolve.”
In 2021, a team of planetary scientists, including scientists from NASA, examined the air that Apollo 17 astronauts brought from the moon in a steel container nearly 50 years ago.
“People think of the Moon as airless, but it has a very sparse atmosphere that interacts with the rocks on the moon’s surface over time,” said Simon, who studies various planetary samples at Johnson. “This includes noble gases escaping from the Moon’s interior and collecting on the Moon’s surface.”
The way Simon’s team extracts the gas for research is similar to what can be done with Perseverance’s air samples. First, they place the previously unopened container in a closed enclosure. They then pierced the steel with a needle to draw the gas into a cold trap; essentially a U-shaped tube extending into a liquid with a low freezing point, such as nitrogen. By changing the temperature of the liquid, the scientists trapped some gases with lower freezing temperatures at the bottom of the cold trap.
“There are maybe 25 laboratories in the world that manipulate gas in this way,” Simon said. He added that in addition to being used to study the origin of planetary materials, the approach can also be applied to gases emitted from hot springs and the walls of active volcanoes.
Of course, these sources provide much more gas in the sample tubes than Perseverance. But if there isn’t enough gas in one tube for a particular experiment, Martian scientists can combine gases from multiple tubes to make a larger composite sample; This is another way that space above water provides additional opportunities for science.
The Perseverance rover, part of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, is an advanced mobile laboratory designed to study the Martian surface. Launched on July 30, 2020 and landing on Mars in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, Perseverance’s primary mission is to search for traces of ancient life and collect rock and regolith (broken rock and soil) samples for possible return. to the Earth
Source: Port Altele
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