People say “Photo or it didn’t happen” and apparently even space robots know what that means. NASA’s Perseverance rover thus provided a stunning panorama of the recently completed sample repository – a mission milestone and the first human specimen collection on another planet. The panorama, combined from 368 images sent back to Earth, captures the careful placement and mapping of 10 titanium tubes over a month.

Eight of these tubes are filled with rock and regolith (rock fragments and dust), one is the atmosphere sample and one is the “witness” tube. The rover photographed the warehouse using the Mastcam-Z camera on its mast or “head” on January 31, 2023. The color has been adjusted to show the Martian surface approximately as it appears to the human eye.

The repository is a reserve collection of samples that can be recovered in the future as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign, a joint effort between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) that aims to return Mars samples to Earth for closer examination. The rover began constructing the warehouse on December 21, 2022 and precisely positioned the pipes in case they need to be retrieved in the future.

The main tubes are at the core of Perseverance and will run through them with future samples taken during the landing mission to the sample collection vehicle as part of the campaign. If something happens to the rover that prevents it from delivering the tubes directly to the landing craft, samples can be taken from the warehouse instead. (Learn more about all 18 samples taken so far.)

Perseverance built a warehouse at Three Forks, a location in Jezero Crater. Billions of years ago, a river flowed into the crater and carried sediment forming a steep fan-shaped delta that the rover would lift up in the coming months.

While the Martian surface is currently cold, dry and generally unsuitable for life, ancient Mars was likely Earth-like and could have supported microbial life if it had once formed on the Red Planet. The samples Perseverance collects could help scientists determine whether life once left its mark in a place like Jezero Crater.

Learn more about the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission

The Perseverance mission to Mars has a core purpose of astrobiology, which involves searching for signs of microbial life that existed in the past. The rover’s primary responsibilities include characterizing the planet’s geological features and past climate, laying the foundation for future human exploration of the Red Planet, and performing its initial mission to retrieve and store Martian rock and regolith, or loose rock and dust.

NASA will then work with the European Space Agency (ESA) to send a spacecraft to Mars to retrieve these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for careful analysis. The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s comprehensive lunar exploration plan to Mars, which includes the Artemis missions to the moon, which will serve as preparations for possible human exploration of Mars.