WASHINGTON, DC— NASA has confirmed that its
Perseverance rover has succeeded in collecting its first rock sample on Mars.
"I've got it!" the space agency tweeted in the
early hours of Monday, alongside a photograph of a rock core slightly thicker
than a pencil inside a sample tube.
اضافة اعلان
NASA said last week it thought it had accomplished the feat,
but poorly-lit photographs taken by the rover meant that the team operating the
mission were not certain whether the sample had stayed inside its tube.
It had to retake the pictures in better lighting, but sending
back the data can take several days.
"With better lighting down the sample tube, you can see
the rock core I collected is still in there," said NASA in the new tweet,
adding that the next stage would be sealing this tube and storing it.
The target was a briefcase-sized rock nicknamed
"Rochette" from a ridgeline that is 900 meters long.
Perseverance uses a drill and a hollow coring bit at the end
of its 2-meter-long robotic arm to extract samples.
After coring the
rock, the rover vibrated the drill bit and
tube for one second, five separate times.
This procedure is called "percuss to ingest" and
is meant to clear the lip of the tube of residual material, and cause the
sample to slide down the tube.
Perseverance landed on an ancient lake bed called the Jezero
Crater in February, on a mission to search for signs of ancient microbial life
using a suite of sophisticated instruments mounted on its turret.
It is also trying to better characterize the Red Planet's
geology and past climate.
Eventually NASA wants to collect samples taken by the rover
in a joint mission with the European Space Agency, sometime in the 2030s.
Its first attempt at taking a sample in August failed after
the rock was too crumbly to withstand the robot's drill.
Read more Technology news
.jpg)
.jpg)
