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NASA’s Perseverance rover has dropped an “early Christmas present” on the Martian floor — a second rock pattern tube. The 7.3-centimetre-long pattern is the longest rock core collected by the Mars rover to this point. This tube is without doubt one of the ten samples that shall be thought-about for a journey again to Earth as a part of the area company’s Mars sample return program.
The Perseverance Rover group at NASA introduced the dropping of the pattern on the rover’s official Twitter account on December 24. “My second sample drop is looking good! This tube holds a piece of sedimentary rock from the edge of the ancient river delta here – the longest rock core I’ve taken to date,” stated a tweet by the company.
The longest rock pattern collected by the Perseverance rover is known as “Mageik” and was drilled out of a rock function known as “Amalik” from a area of the Jezero crater known as “Delta front.” It was collected on November 16 this yr. While the pattern inside the tube measures 7.3 centimetres, the tube itself is “about the size of a marker” in line with the Perseverance Twitter account.
The first pattern dropped on the Martian floor was positioned there on December 21 and is known as “Malay” and was collected on January 31 this yr from one other a part of the Jezero Crater known as “South Seitah.”
According to NASA, the Perseverance Rover’s Sampling and Caching System takes nearly an hour to retrieve the steel tube from the rover’s physique, view it with the interior CacheCam and drop it almost 89 centimetres onto a choose patch on the planet’s floor.
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