The hunt for at least a sign of water or life on Mars continues.
NASA's Perseverance Rover has recently collected its ninth rock sample that will join the other eight in a return-to-Earth mission sometime in the immediate future, per NASA's official Perseverance Mars Rover Twitter page.
The rover is currently exploring the ancient river delta of the Jezero Crater, the place it originally landed in February 2021.
Mars Perseverance Rover Current Mission Progress
NASA's Mars Perseverance Rover is still on the hunt for signs of water or life on Mars, more than a year in its mission. It previously collected eight rock samples, now nine, to see if the red planet was once home to life, or at least it's building blocks.
"Rock sample #9 is in the bag! (Well, in the tube, anyway.)" NASA said in its Perseverance Mars Rover Twitter page. "My team has waited years to get up close to this river delta and see what it might say about past life on Mars. This sample may well get a one-way ticket back to earth in the future!"
Brad Garczynski, a student collaborator at Purdue Univesity, mentioned in a blog post that although the Perseverance team is mainly focused on the river delta region located within the Jezero Crater, they are not done examining the crater itself.
Garczynski claims that Perseverance and the team needs to collect its last crater floor memento before finishing its first science campagn.
The team's secondary goal is to sample a Ch'ał member rock, a higher standing boulder that possibly represents a "unique geologic chapter in the [Jezero Crater's] floor history" that the team has yet to take a sample of.
The Perseverance team agreed to take a sample from a rock target called "Sid," which will undergo a sampling cadence of abrasion and remote/proximity science to further characterize the rock before coring.
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NASA hopes to find within these Ch'ał member rocks an age range for the Jezero Crater's formation and the lake that eventually formed and dried up overtime, per Phys.org.
Once the Ch'ał member rock sample has been acquired, NASA will direct Perseverance to the northern tip of the Seitah and west towards the ancient river delta.
When Perseverance gets there, experts will be able to investigate sedimentary rock layers, clay minerals, and rounded boulders that weren't originally from the crater.
The presence of the rounded boulders indicate that water once flowed into the crater with a current strong enough for the boulders to appear in the crater.
"If microbial life did exist here in the past, this is one of the best places to look for it as finely layered muds may have buried and preserved a record of that microbial activity," Garczynski wrote.
Perseverance's Sample Return Plan
Unfortunately, Perseverance's Martian rock samples aren't due for a return-to-Earth mission in the immediate future, with the European Space Agency stating that they will arrive on Earth by 2033 following a delay.
The delay is caused by revisions to the original plan which involved a lander that utilizes technologies that departed too far from established ones, creating an unacceptable risk.
The revised plan, meanwhile, uses a dual-lander that would allow both space agencies to use the same landing system Perseverance and Curiosity used while avoiding the complexity of the original design.
