For: The opinion Posted 01 Feb 2023, 21:28 pm EST
Mars is seat of first deposit made by humans on another planet and that milestone was achieved hand in hand with the NASA’s Perseverance roverwhich recently deposited the last sample on Martian soil.
NASA reported that mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California confirmed that on Sunday, January 29, NASA’s Perseverance rover had successfully dropped the tenth and final tube planned for the first human deposit on Mars.
“This important milestone involved precision planning and navigation to ensure that the tubes could be safely recovered in the future by the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign, whose objective is to bring samples from Mars to Earth for closer study,” NASA said in a statement.
Throughout his scientific campaigns, the rover has been taking a couple of rock samples that the mission team considers scientifically significant. A sample of each pair taken so far is already in the carefully arranged warehouse in the Three Forks region from Jezero crater.
Half of each pair of samples will be deposited at Three Forks as a reserve pool, and the other half will remain inside Perseverancewhich will be the primary means of transporting the collected samples to the launch vehicle to Mars.
NASA notes that the titanium tubes were deposited on the surface in an intricate zigzag pattern, with each sample separated from each other by a distance of between 5 and 15 meters to ensure they could be safely recovered. In addition to the time required to create the repository, the team had to pinpoint the location of each tube combination and a glove of 18.6 centimeters in length to be able to find the samples even if they were covered with dust.
The Reservoir created by the Perseverance lies on flat groundnear the base of the ancient, elevated, fan-shaped river delta, which was formed long ago when a river emptied into a lake there.
the next mission
the rover is now heading to a new location on Mars for its next mission. Passing the Rocky Top outcrop represents the end of the rover’s Delta Front Campaign and the beginning of the rover’s Delta Top Campaign, due to the geologic transition taking place at that level.
“With the Three Forks deposit in the rear view, Perseverance is now heading toward the delta,” said Rick Welch, deputy project manager for the Perseverance project at JPL. “We will make our ascent by the ‘Hawksbill Gap’ route that we previously explored. Once we pass the geologic unit that the science team calls ‘Rocky Top’, we’ll be in new territory and start exploring the Delta Top.”
One of the first stops the rover will make during the new science campaign is at a place the science team calls the “Curvilinear Unit.” Is about a Martian sandbank made up of sediments deposited eons ago in a bend in one of Jezero’s river channels.
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