Wann landet der mars rover 2022

Perseverance landed inside Mars' Jezero Crater in February 2021 to hunt for signs of ancient Red Planet life and collect samples for future return to Earth. The car-sized rover has drilled out 14 Mars rock cores to date — two apiece from seven target stones — and it will likely drop half of them in November or December, said mission team member Jim Bell of Arizona State University.

This is the opposite of carelessness; it's a safeguard designed to protect the overall Mars sample-return project, which is a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The baseline plan calls for Perseverance to deliver its samples to a NASA lander that sports a built-in rocket, which will launch the Mars material to orbit. An ESA-provided orbiter will then snag the samples and haul them back to Earth. They could land here as soon as 2033.

Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover's 1st year on Mars

The lander, Mars rocket and ESA orbiter are currently scheduled to launch in the 2027-2028 timeframe. Perseverance is in good health, but there's a chance the rover won't be doing so well when that other hardware arrives at the Red Planet. Hence the coming depot drop, which will involve one sample from each drilled rock. (Perseverance will keep the other sample set onboard.)

"This is our backup sample cache, just in case the rover itself can't deliver samples," Bell, the principal investigator for Persevance's Mastcam-Z camera system, said during a livestreamed presentation Thursday (Oct. 20) at the 2022 Mars Society Convention.

The NASA sample-return lander will carry two small helicopters, each of them modeled on Ingenuity, the little rotorcraft that landed on Jezero's floor with Perseverance last year and has aced more than 30 Red Planet flights since. If need be, the two choppers will carry sample tubes, one by one, from the depot — or depots, as there could end up being more than one — to the lander. ("Depot" is a slightly overgrand term for a spot where tubes will be lying in the dirt.)

The depot Perseverance will establish in the next month or two is at a site dubbed Three Forks, which Bell said is a "pretty flat area." The topography is therefore favorable for safe helicopter landings and liftoffs. 

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Perseverance has some work to do before it can head over to Three Forks, however. It's currently collecting regolith — samples of Martian sand and dust — and will likely continue doing so through next week, Bell said.

Perseverance carries a total of 43 titanium tubes, 38 of which are designed to hold samples. The other five are "witness tubes" that will help mission team members determine which materials, if any, in collected Martian samples may be contaminants from Earth.

The rover has filled 15 of its sampling tubes to date, 14 of them with drilled rock cores (though the team is having trouble sealing up the tube with the most recently collected core). The other filled tube contains an "atmospheric sample" — Martian air but nothing else, the result of a drilling effort that went awry thanks to a surprisingly crumbly rock. 

Scientists find the feature so tantalizing because it is sandstone, which is composed of fine grains that have been carried from elsewhere by water before settling and forming stone. Samples that Perseverance collects are central to the first step in the NASA–ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign, which began in September 2021 when the rover cached its first cored rock.

This short animation features key moments of NASA and ESA’s Mars Sample Return campaign, from landing on Mars and securing the sample tubes to launching them off the surface and ferrying them back to Earth. Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/MSFC

“We often prioritize study of fine-grained sedimentary rocks like this one in our search for organics and potential biosignatures,” said Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. “What’s especially interesting about the Yori Pass outcrop is that it is laterally equivalent with ‘Hogwallow Flats,’ where we found very fine-grained sedimentary rocks. That means that the rock bed is located at the same elevation as Hogwallow, and has a large, traceable footprint visible on the surface.”

Perseverance rover acquired this image using its Left Mastcam-Z camera on June 18, 2022 (Sol 472). The rocks at Hogwallow Flats appear to be very fine-grained, which is exciting to scientists on the mission as fine-grained rocks may have the best chance at preserving evidence of life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

One of the Perseverance rover’s four science objectives is the hunt at Jezero Crater for biosignatures (any characteristic, molecule, element, substance, or feature that can serve as evidence for ancient life). Along with its 14 rock-core samples, the rover has collected three witness tubes and one atmospheric sample, all of which are stored in the rover’s belly.

After it collects a sample from Yori Pass, Perseverance will drive 745 feet (227 meters) southeast to a mega sand ripple. Located in the middle of a small dune field, the ripple – called “Observation Mountain” by the science team – will be where the rover collects its first samples of regolith, or crushed rock and dust.

More About the Mission

One of the key objectives for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including caching samples that may contain signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.

Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA, would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.

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