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“I’ve got it,” the cart’s NASA account tweeted with a photo. Perseverance had been drilling into a small rock for three days, but engineers at the Los Angeles control center were initially unable to tell if the sample had landed in the right place. New photos with better lighting show that the drilling mission was successful.
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A previous attempt in August failed. Back then, the drilling action only yielded some rock powder, but now a sample roughly the thickness of a pencil has been recovered.
Water
The six-wheeled Mars explorer landed in a crater on the planet in late February and soon made its first ride. His working area is the crater Jezero where billions of years ago, when water would have flowed on Mars, a river may have flowed into a lake. For research on rocks and soil, the explorer is equipped with more than twenty cameras and a drill. The device has to collect dozens of soil samples in tubes. In 2028, a European explorer should arrive on Mars to collect the stuff.
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