Dimapur, September 6 (EMN): After seven months of driving on Mars, Nasa on Sunday confirmed that the Mars Perseverance rover has managed to collect its first rock sample.
Nasa posted an image on Twitter taken from the Mastcam-Z camera onboard the Mars Perseverance rover showing "a sample tube with its cored-rock contents inside."
"I’ve got it! With better lighting down the sample tube, you can see the rock core I collected is still in there. Up next, I’ll process this sample and seal the tube," wrote Nasa on Twitter.
I’ve got it! With better lighting down the sample tube, you can see the rock core I collected is still in there. Up next, I’ll process this sample and seal the tube. #SamplingMars
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) September 5, 2021
Latest images: https://t.co/Ex1QDo3eC2 pic.twitter.com/gumqpmoXBW
Nasa had initially thought that it had collected the first rock sample on August 6. However, subsequent checks by Nasa engineers showed that the sample tube was empty.
Eventually, Nasa concluded that the rock it had selected for drilling did not have the right consistency that Nasa thought it had. “We need a more cooperative type of rock,” said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance project manager at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This one was crumbly – it may have had a surface that was hard, but once we got in there all the grains just sort of came apart.”
This time, Nasa took additional steps to confirm if Perseverance had indeed collected the sample successfully. The first photos of the sample were taken on September 1 and after doing a procedure called "percuss to ingest" (vibrates the drill bit and tube for one second, five separate times), new images taken on Saturday has confirmed that the sample is intact and can be clearly seen inside the tube.
The Perseverance rover will continue to drill, collect and seal rock samples from the Martian surface. The goal of Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) is to collect as many samples as possible and leave them scattered on the surface for future rovers to collect and bring them back to Earth for analysis.