Nasa’s Perseverance Mars rover deposits its first sample on Red Planet for return mission

Nasa’s Perseverance Mars rover has placed a titanium tube containing Martian rock fragments on the Red Planet’s surface, marking a historic step towards a future sample return mission back to Earth.

The American space agency said in a statement on Wednesday that the sample tube is the first of a total of 10 tubes that the rover will deposit at the site called “Three Forks” over the next two months, marking humanity’s first sample depot on another planet.

In a future Mars Sample Return campaign, the rover would deliver its collected samples to a robotic lander which would then place them in a capsule inside a small rocket that would blast off to Mars orbit.

Another spacecraft orbiting Mars would then capture the sample container and return it safely to Earth, Nasa noted.

The latest sample tube dropped at the depot site contains a chalk-size core of igneous rock which scientists have informally named “Malay”.

This sample was collected in January from a region of Mars’ Jezero Crater called “South Séítah”.

Nasa noted that the sample-dropping exercise was complex, taking “almost an hour” to retrieve the tube from inside the rover’s belly.

The rover then had to view the sample tube one last time with its internal camera and drop it roughly 90cm (3ft) onto a carefully selected patch of surface on Mars.

“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,” Rick Welch, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, said in a statement.

Once the titanium tube was dropped at the site, Nasa teams also had to use the “Watson” camera at the end of Perseverance’s robotic arm to ensure the tube hadn’t rolled into the path of the rover’s wheels.

Teams also had to ensure the tube was not dropped in such a way that it was standing on its end, which Nasa said occurred less than 5 per cent of the time during testing at JPL.

If a sample tube does land in that way, the space agency noted it has written a series of commands for the rover to carefully knock the tube over with a section of its robotic arm.

One of the mission’s main objectives is to search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars and to characterise the planet’s geology and past climate.

The sealed samples once returned to Earth would help scientists conduct more in-depth analysis that was not possible with the limited number of instruments the mission could carry to the Red Planet.