Perseverance Successfully Completes Sample Tube Drop; What's Next For The Martian Rover?

NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover has finally completed its first sample depot. What's next on the cards for the Martian rover?

The Perseverance rover has been quite busy of late, dropping rock samples that future missions could collect. It dropped the first sample back in December 2022. Just a few days ago, it even shared a selfie with a challenge for viewers to spot the sample tubes it had left behind.

"How many lightsab...I mean sample tubes can you spot in my latest selfie?" asked the rover's official Twitter account.

At 8 p.m. EST on Sunday, mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the rover completed the "first sample depot on another world," NASA noted in a news release.

It dropped its tenth and last sample tube at a spot in the Jezero Crater known as "Three Forks" for a future Mars sample return mission. The rover dropped the tubes in a zigzag pattern some 15 to 50 feet away from each other.

This is so that they could one day be safely collected since the sample recovery helicopters are designed to carry just one tube at a time. This way, the samples could be safely retrieved without disturbing the other ones.

"And that's 10! With a final tube drop, I've completed the diverse backup set of samples I'm setting down," NASA tweeted, sharing snaps of the titanium sample tubes that it had dropped. "Future #MarsSampleReturn robots could come for these, or if all goes well, I'll have lots more fascinating stuff in hand when they get here."

The ones that Perseverance dropped are only the backups.

"The rover has been taking a pair of samples from each of its rock targets. Half of every pair will be deposited at Three Forks as a backup set, and the other half will remain inside Perseverance, which will be the primary means to convey the collected samples to the Mars launch vehicle as part of the campaign," NASA previously noted in a news release.

Future missions will collect the samples and bring them back to Earth for scientists to study. The samples could help answer the key question of whether life ever existed on the Red Planet, NASA said.

The sample return mission, which will be a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), still has quite a way to go. However, the samples are expected to be back on Earth sometime in the 2030s.

What about the Perseverance rover? It's headed onto a new science campaign to examine another area. Called the "Delta Top Campaign," the goal would be to look for boulders and materials that were deposited there through an ancient river.

"We found that from the base of the delta up to the level where Rocky Top is located, the rocks appear to have been deposited in a lake environment," said Ken Farley, Perseverance project scientist.

"And those just above Rocky Top appear to have been created in or at the end of a Martian river flowing into the lake. As we ascend the delta into a river setting, we expect to move into rocks that are composed of larger grains – from sand to large boulders. Those materials likely originated in rocks outside of Jezero, eroded and then washed into the crater," Farley explained.

The mission is expected to last for about eight months. Overall, the Perseverance mission is also a part of the preparations for future human exploration of Mars.