Woo-hoo! NASA's Perseverance Mars rover deposits first sample on Martian surface

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has successfully deposite its first sample tube on the Martian surface. Filled with rock, the titanium sample tube is one of 10 forming a depot of tubes at Three Forks that could be considered for a journey to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return campaign.

The six-wheeled rover has been taking duplicate samples from rock targets the mission selects. The depot will serve as a backup if it fails to deliver the samples. In that case, a pair of Ingenuity-inspired Sample Recovery Helicopters would be called upon to finish the job.

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the first sample to drop was a chalk-size core of igneous rock which was collected on Jan. 31, 2022, in South Séítah, a region of Mars’ Jezero Crater. The rover took almost an hour to retrieve the metal tube from inside its belly, view it one last time with its internal CacheCam, and drop the sample roughly 3 feet (89 centimeters) onto a carefully selected patch of Martian surface.

"Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great capstone to our prime mission period, which ends on Jan. 6. It's a nice alignment that, just as we're starting our cache, we’re also closing this first chapter of the mission," said Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at JPL.

Not one to brag, but this is pretty momentous. By dropping this one tube to the ground, I’ve officially started setting aside samples that Mars Sample Return could bring back to Earth someday. Learn more: https://t.co/abNfyxE8Cy pic.twitter.com/SkjzFIn6Kd

— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) December 21, 2022

The Mars Sample Return is a mission of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency), which would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the Martian surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.