The first Martian soil sample destined to arrive on Earth in the next few years is ready.
NASA's Perseverance rover prepared it, which transferred it to the first of the titanium tubes that will form a 'reserve' deposit for the complex Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, born from the cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) The mission plans to send a small rocket to the red planet on which to load the materials and send them to Earth.
In the small titanium tube there are Martian rock samples taken on January 31, 2022 with the Perseverance drill in the region called Sud Séitah near the Jezero crater and it is the first of 10 that will have to form a small reserve deposit as part of Mars Sample Return.
The ambitious mission foresees, in fact, in a few years the descent to Mars of a lander inside which there will be a rocket.
Once the rocket arrives, Perseverance will have to reach it and deposit the samples collected in the meantime inside it.
At that point the rocket will be able to leave to reach a satellite waiting in Martian orbit, which will collect the materials and then bring them to Earth.
The mission is particularly complex and for this reason various plans B have been developed. One of the dangers is that Perseverance may encounter malfunctions: just to get around the problem, the technicians have decided in the meantime to build a small reserve deposit on the site renamed Three Forks, a point where to leave 10 samples which in case of problems could be collected by a team of small drones similar to Ingenuity, the purpose was precisely to verify the feasibility of flying in the Martian atmosphere and which in the meantime has completed 36 flights on Mars.
It took the rover almost an hour to recover the tube from inside its 'belly', reanalyzing it with its cameras before then dropping it on a carefully chosen area.
The robotic arm then activated to verify that the sample had not accidentally ended up under its wheels and sent a photo of it to Earth.