After trying, failing, and trying again the Perseverance rover has finally managed to take a rock sample from the surface of Mars:
After a perplexing failure last month, NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, was able to successfully collect a sample of rock on Wednesday. The rover took pictures of the rock in the tube and sent the images to Earth so that mission managers could be sure they had not come up empty again. The rock was there.
“On Mars, NASA’s Perseverance Rover Drilled the Rocks It Came For,” New York Times
The earlier failure shows that even the simplest of tasks are not so simple on other planets. The sample will now be safely stored onboard the rover, ready for collection and return to Earth by a future mission.
Featured image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
Three Alpha 