Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, December 22 (Xinhua)-- A titanium tube containing rock samples was placed on the ground of the Red Planet by NASA's perseverance rover on December 21. In the next two months, the probe will place a total of 10 similar tubes in this place known as the "three forks" to build the first human sample bank on another planet. The sample bank marks a historic first step in Martian sample collection.

CTOnews.com learned that Yili has been taking duplicate samples from its mission-selected rock targets, and that there are currently 17 other samples (including an atmospheric sample) collected so far in the rover's belly.

According to the structure of the Mars sample return activity, the rover will deliver samples to future robot landers. The lander will use a robotic arm to put the sample into a sealed capsule on a small rocket, which will be launched into Mars orbit, and another spacecraft will capture the sample container and send it safely back to Earth.

If perseverance cannot deliver its samples, the sample library placed on the Martian ground will serve as an alternative plan. In this case, the scientists will call a pair of sample recovery helicopters to collect samples.

The first sample to be dropped was an igneous core, informally named Malay, which was collected on January 31, 2022 in an area of the Jazelo crater on Mars called Nanceta. Perseverance took nearly an hour to remove the metal tube from its belly, checked it for the last time with its internal CacheCam camera, and threw the sample onto a carefully selected piece of Martian ground.

But for engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the work is not done yet, which built perseverance and led the mission. Once they confirmed that the sample tube had fallen, the team placed the WATSON camera at the end of the 2-meter-long robotic arm of the perseverance to monitor the bottom of the rover and check to make sure the sample tube was not in the path of the rover wheel.

Collecting samples will reveal more information about Martian geology and climate and help find signs of microbes that once existed on the Red Planet.

CTOnews.com learned that NASA is not the only country that wants to collect samples from Mars. Japan's space agency also wants to take samples from Mars, and the MMX mission plans to land on Mars's potato-shaped moon Phobos and bring them back to Japan by the end of the century.

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