NASA’s Perseverance Rover Has Successfully Collected Its First Rock Sample:
NASA’s Perseverance rover has successfully collected its first rock sample for return to Earth. NASA has called it a perfect core sample.
- NASA plans to launch more spacecraft to retrieve the samples collected by Perseverance.
- Perseverance arrived in February 2021 at Mars’ Jezero Crater, the site on an ancient lake— in search of rocks that might hold evidence of ancient life.
- It carried a unique instrument, MOXIE or Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment: which for the first time manufactured molecular oxygen on Mars using carbon dioxide from the carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere (ISRU means In Situ Resource Utilization: or the use of local resources to meet human needs or requirements of the spacecraft).
- It carried Ingenuity,the first ever helicopter to fly on Mars.
- It is the planned first step to bring back rock samples from Marsfor analysis in sophisticated laboratories on Earth: with the goal of looking for biosignatures: or signatures of present or past life.
