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It’s a lucky turnaround since early August, when Perseverance made its first attempt at taking a sample, but scientists discovered that nothing actually ended up in the collection tube. The core drilling mechanism unfortunately turned the brittle rock into a powder, which fell back into the ground near the borehole. Rochette was chosen in part because the rock there was considered harder and more likely to get stuck in the tube.
Why is it important: Collecting samples is one of the marquee objectives of the mission. Perseverance is equipped with 43 collection tubes, and NASA hopes to fill them all with rock and soil samples from Mars until one day they can be brought back to Earth. The 28-mile-long Jezero Crater is thought to be the site of an ancient river delta. If Mars was a habitable place during its wet period billions of years ago, this is one of the best spots for fossilized life to find a home. While Perseverance is equipped with tools to tell us a lot about what’s going on at Jezero, the best opportunity to look for biosignatures and traces of microbial life is actually a lab on Earth.
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