In the coming days, the Perseverance rover will start building a repository for soil samples on Mars, which will be an important step in the NASA-ESA mission to bring them from Mars to Earth for further study. By the way reported Friday, NASA on its website. 10 containers will be placed in the depot. It will take about 30 days to create it.
The storage of samples is created in order to avoid accidents that could occur during the organization of their delivery to Earth. Each time Perseverance extracts two copies of Martian soil samples. One of them will remain aboard the rover, which will be the primary means of delivering collected samples to the launch vehicle, while a backup set will be placed in storage.
Finding a location for the vault proved difficult, as a flat, rock-free area had to be found in Jezero crater where Martian transport helicopters such as Ingenuity could land and take off with the containers on board. As a result, specialists from the American space agency stopped in an area called Three Forks.
After selecting a suitable location, the next task was to determine exactly where and how to place the sample containers. “You can’t just throw them in a big pile because transport helicopters are designed to only deliver one container at a time.” said Richard Cook, Mars Sample Return (MSR) program manager. According to him, in order for the helicopter to pick up containers without violating the integrity of the warehouse and without encountering obstacles in the form of stones, each container storage location must have “work area” with a diameter of at least 5.5 meters. To this end, the containers will be arranged along a broken line at a distance of between 5 and 15 meters from each other.
To date, Perseverance has already collected 18 soil samples, two for each area of interest to scientists. As planned, the delivery of soil samples from Mars to Earth will take place in 2033.
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