NASA's Perseverance Rover Achieves Remarkable Feat on Mars
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has created "the first interplanetary depositary made by humans.
10 titanium tubes filled with rock and dust specimens were placed in a designated spot on Mars within 6 weeks.
The samples may be retrieved and brought back to Earth for analysis in the future.
The depositary is not a physical structure, but a designated area chosen to preserve the samples.
Perseverance placed the first titanium tube at the depositary in December and added 9 more, with the location of each recorded.
The Mars Sample Return mission plans to retrieve the samples via a robot, transfer them to a capsule, and send it back to Earth in the early 2030s.
In case of difficulty in collecting samples from Perseverance, efforts will be made to retrieve the samples from the depositary.
The Perseverance rover has used its tools to extract samples from scientifically significant areas determined by NASA's JPL team.
The rock cores collected from the igneous and sedimentary layers provide valuable representation of geological events in Jezero crater 4 billion years ago.
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