Perseverance’s depot of core samples, ready for pickup

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February 15, 2023 10:30 am Robert Zimmerman

Mosaic of Perseverance's core sample depot
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Click for interactive map.

The Perseverance science team yesterday released the annotated mosaic above, cropped to post here, showing the scattered depot of core samples the rover deposited on the floor of Jezero Crater for later pickup some time next decade for return to Earth.

The overview map to the right shows the context. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s position when it took the picture, on January 31, 2023. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s location at that time. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the mosaic. The green outline indicates the area of the depot.

Eight of those tubes are filled with rock and regolith (broken rock and dust), while one is an atmospheric sample and one is a “witness” tube. The rover photographed the depot using the Mastcam-Z camera on the top of its mast, or “head,” on Jan. 31, 2023. The color has been adjusted to show the Martian surface approximately as it would look to the human eye.

The location of each tube was carefully mapped because it is possible wind will cover them with dust in the decade-plus before pickup. This mosaic will also act as a guide for the future Mars helicopters that will arrive to grab the core samples and bring them to an ascent spacecraft that will bring them back to Earth.

2 comments

MDN

February 15, 2023 at 9:45 pm

Seems silly to spread them out like that. Aren’t the tubes stamped with serial numbers or something to make mapping what each sample is? It’s probably a nit given the advent and intent of rotorcraft for it but this seems like it unnecessarily complicates retrieval.

And actually I don’t understand the idea of dropping them off the rover already anyway. Why not wait until the retrieval mission is there? Then we’d only need to get to one location and could get all the goods in one go. Seems like NASA might be feeling their oats a bit too recklessly after the success of the hideously complex JWST. But I bet this aspect of the Perseverance mission didn’t get tested and failsafed near as much
Robert Zimmerman

February 15, 2023 at 10:09 pm

MDN: Please read this post about the logic behind the placement. There has been careful thought put into this, believe me.

I know that we now rarely trust the work of government “experts”, but we must not assume always they are dumb or stupid. The success of both Mars rovers and Ingenuity as well as the orbiters tells us that the American planetary science and engineering community really does have its act together, and generally acts with common sense.

Even though I am a big critic of government and NASA, I try to know my facts before criticizing. I now ask my readers to do the same. Too often I find the comments here to be quick off the cuff fault-finding, often without doing the slightest research, some of which I find can be accomplished by one ten second DuckDuckGo search. Sometimes the criticisms are made without even reading my entire post, or even clicking on the story I am linking to. This is unfair, and an example of the same kind of sloppiness that is leading us into a dark age.

I would hope my readers could be better. Please prove my good opinion of you all is correct.

Perseverance’s depot of core samples, ready for pickup

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