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The capsule from NASA's Osiris-Rex mission seen after parachuting from space down to the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. The sample inside it was collected from the asteroid Bennu in October 2020.
"While this may feel like the end of an incredible chapter, it's truly just the beginning of another," Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for Osiris-Rex based at the University of Arizona, said in a statement. "We now have the unprecedented opportunity to analyze these samples and delve deeper into the secrets of our solar system."
Since launching on Sept. 8, 2016, Osiris-Rex has traveled billions of miles to Bennu and back. It is the first such mission led by NASA. Japan's space agency sent two spacecraft, named Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2, to collect and deliver samples from asteroids Itokawa and Ryugu, respectively.
In Houston, the sample will undergo preliminary analysis and be unveiled on Oct. 11 in a livestreamed news conference. It's hoped the sample will provide scientists with a window into the birth of the solar system, including the sun and planets, some 4.5 billion years ago.
As for the main spacecraft, it isn't done. After sending its treasure to the surface, Osiris-Rex fired its engines to avoid smashing into the atmosphere. It will now continue on to its next target, the asteroid Apophis, under the new moniker Osiris-Apex (Osiris-Apophis Explorer). The vehicle isn't equipped to collect and deliver another sample, but it may try to blast the asteroid with its gas thrusters in an attempt to dislodge dust and other small bits for study.
Ideally, Perseverance will still be rolling around Jezero Crater when MSR arrives, and will be able to greet the mission in person to deliver its rock samples. But the mission is too important to leave that up to chance. We know how tough Mars can be on our robotic emissaries. The sample depot will offer another way to collect the rock tubes. Percy has been drilling samples in pairs so it can drop one at the depot and keep the matching partner on board.
NASA has chosen a spot named Three Forks for the sample depot. It wasn't easy to pick it out. The site needed to be level and free of rocks on a planet that's notoriously rocky. MSR will have two small, sample-fetching helicopters with it. Those rotorcrafts are inspired by the success of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. They require a safe place to land to pick up the tubes.
Percy will drop 10 sample tubes from its belly onto the ground. The tough titanium tubes will fall 2.9 feet (88.8 centimeters). "You can't simply drop them in a big pile because the recovery helicopters are designed to interact with only one tube at a time," said MSR program manager Richard Cook. NASA said the tubes will be deposited in an intricate zigzag pattern at distances of 6 to 49 feet (5 to 15 meters) apart.
Scientists suspect Jezero Crater was once an ancient lake bed. Percy has found rocks with volcanic origins and ones that are tied into the planet's history of water. It's spotted organic molecules in some rocks, but we'll need to get those samples into labs on Earth to determine if they contain evidence of ancient microbial life.
Perseverance has its work cut out for it, but the rover team is still planning ahead. Once it's done building the depot, Percy will climb to the top of a long-dry river delta it's been exploring. The views should be spectacular, and NASA hopes to find more tantalizing rocks to sample. Onward.
NASA called the depot completion a major milestone that involved precision planning and navigation to make sure the tubes could be collected by two helicopters from the MSR mission. The rover has been gathering samples in pairs, so it could drop one on the ground and keep the other on board. NASA expects Percy will meet the MSR lander in person to deliver its samples, but if anything prevents that, then the helicopters and sample depot will be the fallback.
The tubes are mostly full of rock, but the rover also dropped a sample of the Martian atmosphere and a "witness" tube that could help scientists determine if there was any accidental contamination from Earth. Witness tubes go through the motions of sampling and sealing, but aren't filled with rock or soil.
The completion of the depot marks the end of a major task and the beginning of a new exploration as Perseverance heads up an ancient river delta. The rover has been in residence on Mars since early 2021. It's already proven itself to be a powerhouse of science. Its rock samples might revolutionize our understanding of life in our solar system. Good work, Percy.
NASA released a rousing new video on Thursday with an animated run through how the Mars Sample Return mission would work. The goal is to pick up the rock and soil samples collected by NASA's Perseverance rover and get them to Earth for study. Pulling it off will be complicated, but the reward is great.
The video has it all. A soaring soundtrack. A charming head-tilt from Percy. A heart-warming happy ending. The animation is a good illustration of the complexity of the mission and the optimism that's powering it. We're looking for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars and getting samples into scientists' hands is our best shot at doing that.
The video leaves out some proposed aspects of the mission, notably the plan to send a couple of small helicopters that could go fetch sample tubes should something prevent the rover from coming in person to meet the lander.
If all goes well, the Sample Retrieval Lander would launch in 2028, kicking off the mission in earnest. That would mean samples could be in labs by the mid-2030s. And then what? Maybe we'll finally learn if there was life beyond Earth. That would be well worth all the effort of this wild mission.
The sample was collected on Jan. 31 and is informally known as "Malay." The sample itself is about the size of a piece of chalk and protected from the harsh Martian environment within the titanium tube. Perseverance held onto it all year, before dropping it about three feet to Mars' rocky ground.
"Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great capstone to our prime mission period," Rick Welch, the deputy project manager for Perseverance at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement.
NASA and the European Space Agency are developing a Mars lander specifically designed to grab samples from the Perseverance rover's belly, place them in a rocket and blast them from Mars back to Earth. Such a mission would not return the samples to Earth until the early 2030s.
However, there are contingencies. If Perseverance can't get to the lander and deliver the samples, the backup plan is to nab samples it deposits in the depot with a pair of helicopters. Yes, helicopters. As Mars watchers know, helicopters work pretty well on the red planet. Over the coming weeks, Percy is expected to drop more samples before its prime mission period ends on Jan. 6, 2023.
NASA isn't the only would-be Mars sample-returner. Japan's space agency is hoping to grab samples from the Martian sphere, too. The MMX mission plans to land on Mars' potato-shaped moon, Phobos, and bring those samples back home before the end of the decade.
NASA challenged space fans to see how many sample tubes they could spot in the image. I was able to count three, but there might be a lot more. The one right in front of the rover was the ninth tube to be dropped. I contains a sample of volcanic igneous rock originally found near the rover's landing site.
Building the depot started in December 2022 and has taken weeks. The depot is laid out in a specific pattern and involves 10 separate tubes that look like little Star Wars lightsaber handles. Most of the tubes contain small, chalk-size samples of Mars rocks collected in the Jezero Crater.
The depot is a backup plan for the future Mars Sample Return mission, a complex, multistage endeavor that'll aim to pick up Percy's samples and bring them back to Earth in the 2030s for closer study. NASA hopes the rover will be in good shape when MSR arrives, so it can deliver the samples itself. If not, then the mission will send a pair of small helicopters to the sample depot site to pick up the tubes left there. Percy has been collecting samples in pairs, so it can drop one and keep the other on board.
The Jezero Crater has an intriguing history of water and is home to an ancient river delta region. Rock samples from the delta area are particularly exciting. Scientists hope they'll give us insights into whether the red planet once hosted microbial life.
When the spacecraft's robotic sampling arm, named Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism, or Tagsam, touched down on Bennu, it performed what amounts to a cosmic pickpocketing maneuver. Mission planners expected that the total time of contact between the arm and asteroid would be less than 16 seconds. When preliminary data was released, it showed that the period of contact was just six seconds, with much of the sample collection happening in only the first three.
The spacecraft, which operates largely autonomously due to the 18-minute communications delay with mission control on Earth, fired a canister of gas through Tagsam that disrupted the surface of Bennu and forced a sample into the arm's collector head.
Photos taken of the head on Oct. 22 showed that so much sample was collected that some larger rocks seemed to fail to make it all the way inside, wedging a mylar flap meant to seal the container partially open, allowing some small bits of dust and pebbles to escape back out into space.
Captured by the spacecraft's SamCam camera Oct. 22, this series of three images shows the sampler head on Osiris-Rex is full of rocks and dust collected from the surface of Bennu. They also show that some of these particles are slowly escaping the sampler head.
Although the above GIF appears relatively fast, the operation proceeded much more delicately. The arm was lowered at around 10 centimeters per second, much slower than walking pace, when it contacted the sample site.
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