A titanium tube containing the rock sample lies on the surface of the Red Planet after it was placed there by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover on Dec. Over the next two months, the rover will build the first sample repository on another planet by placing a total of 10 tubes at a site called Three Forks. The repository marks a historic early step in the campaign to return samples from Mars.

Persistence received copies of rock samples selected by the mission. Currently, there are 17 more samples (including one atmospheric sample) taken in the rover’s abdomen. Based on the architecture of the Mars Sample Return campaign, the rover was supposed to deliver samples to a future robotic lander. The lander will use a robotic arm to place samples in a containment pod on a small rocket that will be launched into Mars orbit, where another spacecraft will take the sample container and return it safely to Earth.

The first specimen to fall was a chalk-sized igneous rock core, informally called “Malai”, which was collected on January 31, 2022, in an area of ​​the Martian crater Jezero called “South Seita”. Perseverance’s advanced sampling and caching system took about an hour to take a metal tube from the rover’s womb, take one last look at it with the onboard CacheCam, and drop the sample onto a carefully selected patch of about 3 feet (89 centimeters) of Martian surface. .

But the work wasn’t done for the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who built Perseverance and led the mission.

After confirming that the pipe had fallen, the team placed the WATSON camera at the end of Perseverance’s 7-foot-long robotic arm under the rover to see if the pipe had fallen. rolled along the path of the wheels of the all-terrain vehicle. They also wanted to make sure it didn’t fall over the end of the tube (each tube has a flat end called a glove to make it easier to take on future tasks). This happened less than 5% of the time during tests of Perseverance’s Earth twin at JPL’s Mars Yard.

Just in case this was on Mars, the mission wrote Perseverance a series of commands to carefully knock down the pipe with part of the tower at the end of its robotic arm. In the coming weeks, they’ll have another opportunity to see if Perseverance should use this technique as the rover delivers more samples to the Three Forks hideout.

“Observing our first sample on the ground is a great end to our main mission, which ends Jan. “Nice alignment, once we launch the bunker we’re closing this first part of the mission.”