Has the Perseverance rover finally persevered in its quest for collecting rock samples from Mars?
Not long ago, NASA’s Perseverence rover was struggling to collect rock samples from the Martian land and just like any good parents that never blame their own children, NASA blamed the rock samples for being too crumbly to be picked up by the rover. The incident may have been a result of rotary percussion drilling which caused the sample to disintegrate and turn to dust before it could be sampled. But seems like things are finally on the right track as Perseverance finally managed to collect some rock samples!
NASA decided to move the rover to a new area before drilling again for the rocks as they didn’t want to repeat the same blunder again. NASA released the new image in which the rock sample can be successfully seen inside the sample tube set and even ordered Perseverence to up its photography skills and take more pictures with better light conditions so they can confirm the presence of the core before sealing the sample tube and storing it in the container. The picture was taken by a Mastcam-Z camera on 1st September which shows a drill bit holding a pencil-thick core in the sample tube. Looks like Perseverance can also have a career in photography in the future.
If all goes well, the cache container containing the samples which is dropped on the Martian surface will be retrieved by another sample return rover which will hand it over to a series of spacecrafts that will launch into Mars’ orbit from where they will be arrive back on Earth. After making a one-way trip to our planet, the rock samples will be analyzed in detail to help scientists determine if there was any existence of life on Mars long ago or even if some species still live there but we’re not aware of them yet.