Perseverance Rover Takes Selfie on Mars, Showcasing Wheel Tracks and Sample Tubes.
The NASA Perseverance rover is nearing completion of its first extraterrestrial sample cache by placing sample tubes on the Martian surface. To commemorate this milestone, the rover took a selfie with its sample tubes.
Perseverance Rover takes a selfie on Mars with sample tubes at the cache. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS).
The final image was compiled from various photos taken by Perseverance on January 22. NASA released the photo on January 24. The sample tube directly in front of the rover is the ninth tube deposited in the cache, containing volcanic rock samples collected near the rover’s landing site.
The construction of the sample cache began in December 2022 and took several weeks to complete. The cache will hold 10 tubes arranged in a specific structure. Most of the tubes contain small Martian rock samples collected from the Jezero Crater.
The cache serves as a backup plan for the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission – a collaborative effort between the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA aimed at bringing Martian soil and rock samples back to Earth in the 2030s. NASA hopes that Perseverance will still be operational when the MSR vehicle arrives to retrieve the samples. If not, two small helicopters will be dispatched to the cache to collect the sample tubes. Perseverance collects samples in pairs, allowing it to drop one sample in the cache while retaining the other.
“We can’t just drop them in a big pile because the helicopters are designed to interact with one tube at a time,” said Richard Cook, program manager at MSR. According to NASA, these tubes will be placed in a complex zigzag pattern with distances of 5 to 15 meters apart. The sample cache site needs to be flat and free of rocks—an arduous requirement for a planet known for its rocky terrain. Ultimately, NASA selected a location named Three Forks.
The Jezero Crater spans 45 kilometers and likely once harbored a large lake and river delta billions of years ago. The rock and soil samples from the river delta area are expected to be particularly intriguing. Scientists hope they will provide valuable insights into whether the Red Planet ever hosted microbial life.
