Holy Martyr came early this year.
NASA’s Perseverance mission has dropped its first treasure trove of precious rock in the Martian sand, after recording material that a future mission could bring back to Earth. It is a major milestone in the search for life on Tuesday, NASA officials said in a statement on Wednesday (Dec. 21).
Renault Or help to search for microbial life in the old Delta river, as NASA Jet Propulsion said in an update. (Opens in a new tab)It will include 10 titanium pipes deposited at this location, nicknamed “Three Pipes”.
Sometime in the 2030s, if schedules hold, either the Perseverance or two helicopters (like the one flying today’s Ingenius Mars helicopter that completed its flight 37 days ago) will tube rocky fords like this one in Lake Crater to the waiting ship.
Related: Persisting Mars pirates begin caching samples for future return to Earth
But here is the back pipe; The persistent twin collects the samples at each location and his mission requires that he make the delivery himself, using the locker inside the pirate. But, if needed, helicopters can be called in to collect the backup pipes left on the Martian surface.
However the tubes are delivered, the spacecraft will send them to space and deliver the samples to a waiting orbit to return the samples to Earth. In addition to the few carved meteorites from Mars that have fallen on our planet, the historic shipment will represent the first time rocks have made it to Red Planet Earth.
One of the main elements of life on Mars appears to be abundant, or at least it was in ancient times: Water. Huge canyons, large icebergs and underwater pools of water suggest that Mars was rich with water in the ancient past, despite the planet’s dry and dusty appearance today.
But whether it is sufficient for the maintenance of life requires the ground of truth, which is where perseverance comes from. But the lover can only carry so many instruments with him; sending samples back to Earth allows the entire laboratory the opportunity to review Martian bits for signatures of ancient life.
The first sample to hit the regolith is about the size of a piece of chalk, collected from an igneous rock named “Malay” on January 31 in the region of “South Séítah”. The southern Séitah by itself means; Scientists reported weeks before they found an organic sample in the same area as a possible ingredient for life.
It took about an hour of car-sized persistence to spit the tube out of its belly, where the sampling and caching system resides. The tube fell three feet (89 centimeters) onto a flat spot on the Martian surface, as planned, and engineers on Earth imagined the area to drive the persistence so the persistence wouldn’t accidentally roll over it.
In pictures: 12 amazing images from Perseverance Pirates on Tuesday 1st
The drawings came back showing the tube well off the road and level, but NASA made a contingency plan in place in case the erected pipe ended up in the sand. “The mission wrote a series of instructions for Perseverance to carefully tap the tube with part of the tower at the end of its robotic arm,” agency officials wrote.
Engineers have tested the procedure by flattening the tube with a pirate persistence inside a “Mars dock” suitable sandbox at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California where engines are tested in conditions similar to the Red Planet. The correct deposits were made in these simulations of about five percent, which is why the mission has a backup.
The milestone comes just weeks before the end of Perseverance’s first mission on January 6, 2023; The mission will mark two years on the surface of Mars on February 18. he will wander through the scope of the mission, based on his publications and contributions to scientists of this type to return to the sample.
“It’s a good night because, just as we’re starting from our space, we’re also closing this first mission head,” Rick Welch, JPL’s deputy manager of Persistence, said in the same statement.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Taller? (Opens in a new tab)? ” (ECW Press, 2022; astronaut with Canadian Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. @howellspace (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (Opens in a new tab) or * Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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