NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has finished what the space agency is calling “humanity’s first sample depot on another planet.”
Less than six weeks after it began the task, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed what the space agency is calling “humanity’s first sample depot on another planet.”
The depot contains 10 titanium tubes filled with samples of martian rock and dust collected by Perseverance in the two years since it arrived on the distant planet. Depending on how things pan out, they may be gathered up by another NASA mission and returned to Earth.
To be clear, the depot isn’t a building, nor even a box of some sort. It’s merely an exposed patch of land selected by NASA to store the samples.
Perseverance set down the first 18.6-centimeter-long tube for the depot in December, and after that added a further nine, with the last put down in recent days.
