NASA confirms successful sampling on Mars mission

The US space agency NASA announced on Monday. One of the photos showed a piece of rock that was slightly thicker than a pencil and was in a test tube. Last week, NASA announced that it had “probably” succeeded in collecting a sample of the rock. However, the image transmission was not of sufficient quality.

So new photos were taken, the transmission of which took several days. NASA is now participating via Twitter So that the rock sample is in the tube, which will be sealed and stored in another working step. “Perseverance” is equipped with a drill and a hollow body on its two-meter robotic arm for sampling.

The ‘Persevere’ off-road rover nearly touched down at Jezero Crater on Mars in February. Scientists believe that there was a deep lake there about 3.5 billion years ago, which emptied and refilled many times over the course of time and provided suitable conditions for organic life.

However, it will be years before scientists can analyze the samples themselves: NASA is not planning a mission with the European Space Agency (ESA) to bring the samples to Earth to take it back. There they must be examined for their chemical and mineral composition in order to find out whether the rocks are of volcanic origin or whether they are sedimentary rocks.