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Perseverance Mars rover picks up 'lucky' 13th rock sample for return to Earth - Space.com

Perseverance Mars rover picks up 'lucky' 13th rock sample for return to Earth - Space.com

Perseverance Mars rover picks up 'lucky' 13th rock sample for return to Earth - Space.com
Oct 05, 2022 1 min, 14 secs

NASA's Perseverance rover has snagged another Red Planet sample for eventual shipment to Earth.

Perseverance, which is exploring Jezero Crater on Mars, collected its 13th drilled-out rock core in recent days, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages the car-sized robot's mission.

#SamplingMars," JPL officials said via Twitter (opens in new tab) on Tuesday (Oct. 4), in a post that also featured photos of the newly collected sample.

As Perseverance grows its cache of Red Planet rocks, rover team members are preparing for an ambitious future phase of the mission: sending these samples to Earth, perhaps as soon as 2033.

The sample-return campaign, a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), offers a good chance to hunt for signs of ancient Mars life, as Jezero Crater hosted a big lake and a river delta billions of years ago.

The nominal plan is for Perseverance to deliver the rock cores to a NASA sample-return lander, which will also carry a small rocket.

The rocket will launch the samples to Mars orbit, where they'll meet up with an ESA-provided Earth return orbiter.

The depots represent a backup option, in case Perseverance isn't able to haul the samples to the lander.

Indeed, Ingenuity's success is already shaping NASA's Mars exploration plans; the two fetch helicopters that will launch with the sample-return lander, for example, will be very similar to Ingenuity!

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