NASA Details Next Steps After Mars Rover’s Attempt to Collect Rock Goes Awry

Scientists at NASA have been fairly excited in early August when the Perseverance rover indicated that it had drilled its first pattern of Martian rock. But because it turned out, the pattern tube was empty, and the Perseverance staff started a distant investigation to resolve the thriller of the disappearing rock.

Kenneth Farley, a venture scientist on the California Institute of Technology and a member of the Perseverance staff, outlined the mission’s subsequent steps in a blog post printed late final week. The rock goal in query, nicknamed Roubion, crumbled into mud because the rover drilled into it. The goal was a flat stone, a part of the Crater Floor-Fractured Rough stretch of Jezero Crater that NASA scientists consider may maintain among the oldest details about the dried up lake mattress; if not proof of fossil life, the rock pattern would at the very least comprise details about the Red Planet’s historic local weather and geologic historical past.

Because the flat, polygonal goal stone turned out to be unfit for sampling, Farley stated that the staff has pivoted to “rocks as different as possible … to allow us to test the idea that Roubion was just a poorly behaved rock.” The subsequent goal is Citadelle, an outcrop of a quarter-mile rocky ridgeline within the crater. Citadelle’s boulders are a really totally different kind of coring venture than the finely layered sediment of the Crater Floor-Fractured Rough.

Farley stated the staff will doubtless pick a sampling goal on Citadelle and start planning the coring this week, with the intention of sampling the outcrop across the finish of August. If that try is profitable, Citadelle’s rock would be the first of dozens of samples to be extracted from the Martian floor. NASA plans for these samples to finally be picked up by one other mission and delivered to Earth within the early 2030s. All advised, that mission can be some of the formidable in current area exploration historical past, and definitely within the historical past of Martian exploration. If the samples are delivered to Earth efficiently, they would be the most distant objects in area collected by humankind.

After Citadelle, there are a pair objects already on the docket for Perseverance. The rover is scheduled to take a look at particulars of the Séítah, a dune-covered swath of the crater, and it must finally arrive on the delta that followers into the crater, a web site that researchers consider is most promising by way of potential astrobiology. (That hope is predicated on the place primordial microorganisms are inclined to crop up on Earth—the dried-up river delta is the Martian analogue.)

But earlier than Perseverance arrives on the delta, Farley stated that the rover could head again to the fractured tough and take a look at coring it once more. There’s an opportunity that Perseverance simply acquired unfortunate with a very cussed rock, he stated, including that the rocks from the identical area that stick up from the bottom may very well be extra structurally sound and thus higher sampling targets.

Perseverance’s complete mission is anticipated to run two years, so right here’s hoping that the primary sampling try was only a blip in an in any other case excellent profession on Mars.