Perseverance pays off

WE can’t see Mars in our Tasmanian sky at the moment, nor can it be seen from anywhere in the world, because it is currently lost in the glare of the sun.

However, there has been some exciting news about the Red Planet this month.

Perseverance is the name of the Mars rover collecting samples of the Red Planet, and indeed, perseverance is a very important aspect of planetary exploration.

Following a failure on its first attempt, the rover has succeeded in obtaining its first samples of Martian material, which will, some day, be transported to Earth.

Collection of surface material is one of the key goals of NASA’s latest Mars rover, which landed on February 19.

This goal is a rather longterm one, because it will not be completed until many years have gone by, when we shall enjoy the return of samples of the Martian surface to Earth for study.

For now, the rover’s job is to collect a number of samples ready for later collection by a mission capable of retrieving them.

Perseverance was not designed to make the journey home, or even carry a craft capable of doing this.

The rover carries 43 sample tubes, and scientists are hoping at least 20 of them will contain Martian material that they will be able to study.

August’s attempt at sample

collection — using the sampling and caching system on a rock with the nickname Roubion — was disappointing. Everything seemed to go well, with the tool boring into a rock as planned.

However, the bad news came when there was an attempt to use the Volume Assessment Station to measure the volume of the sample that had been extracted.

It does this by detecting the resistance exerted on a

probe by the sample inserted into the tube. However, there was no resistance at all, and an image of the tube later confirmed that it was empty.

Just as you or I might look around on the ground to try to find something that we thought we had dropped, mission controllers did just that, but the images failed to show anything of the sort.

The sample was simply not there, and the most likely explanation seems to be that the

rock fragmented during its collection.

On reflection, it was an old rock that contained a lot of rust, and it would seem that it was not structurally sound.

Even so, no doubt there were some researchers becoming concerned about the equipment, and they would have been quite relieved to learn on September 6 that two more attempts, using a different rock nicknamed Rochette, had succeeded.

An initial analysis shows the rock cores are igneous, meaning they result from volcanic eruptions (which would have taken place long ago).

A major hope is that the cores contain small amounts of trapped liquids.

This would be an exciting find, because they would be ancient samples that date back to a time when the crater called Jezero, in which Perseverance landed, was wet.

Today, the conditions on

Mars’ surface do not allow liquid water to be stable, so examining its presence in the samples would be like having access to a time machine to travel into the distant past.

We shall have to wait for future missions, probably in the early 2030s, to bring us the samples, but they won’t be the first ones from Mars.

Of the many thousands of meteorites found on Earth, a few hundred are known, or suspected, to have originated on Mars, blasted off the surface and into space by asteroid impacts and eventually encountering Earth.

One of the more famous of the Martian meteorites is the Nakhla meteorite, which fell over Egypt on June 28, 1911.

It exploded on its way through the atmosphere and was fragmented into about 40 pieces.

One of the pieces was said to have hit and killed a dog! Some doubt has been cast on that story, but if true, the poor dog was an extremely unlucky animal!

Even though we have these meteorites, sealed samples collected directly from Mars, and not exposed to a fiery entry through Earth’s atmosphere, will be of prime importance.

We have a long wait before we have the material currently being collected by Perseverance, but it’s one of the many things to look forward to in coming years and decades, including more probes to the planets — even including, hopefully, Uranus and Neptune.