On December 21, NASA’s Perseverance rover dropped a special titanium tube onto the surface of the Red Planet – scientists hope that there will be 9 more of them, all of which will be laid down in a specially designated sector called Three Forks (“Three Forks”). In these tubes, the rover places samples of Martian rocks in order to be later delivered to Earth for detailed study. The first and only copy at the moment contains a core of igneous rock the size of a chalk, which was collected on January 31 – almost a year ago.
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The remaining planned pipes with rocks carefully selected by scientists are to be abandoned within the next two months in the Three Forks sector. This mock Martian sample warehouse will be the first step in a campaign to bring Martian samples back to Earth.
Resetting each of the tubes is a responsible and important task. The first time the rover took about an hour to remove the metal tube from its body, inspect it for the final time and drop it from a height of about 89 cm onto a carefully selected area of ​​Martian rock. When this happened, this intermediate mission was not completed – scientists using cameras had to make sure that the tube did not roll under the wheels of the rover and did not fall on a special flat end used for convenient picking up in the future (if this happened, it would have to be carefully knocked down – during tests on Earth, this happened in less than 5% of cases).
Source: Trash Box
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