A second attempt to retrieve a rock sample on Mars by the US space agency’s Perseverance rover appears to have succeeded.
If the success is confirmed, this will be the first rock section collected on another planet intended for return to Earth.
According to the BBC, the robot’s drill made a neat hole in a thick slab dubbed ‘Rochette’. In the first attempt, the sample crumbled to dust.
But images of the second attempt appear to show that a rock core was securely retrieved.
The rover is tasked with gathering more than two dozen cores over the next year or so that will be fetched home by a joint US and European effort later this decade.
Nasa’s Perseverance robot landed in Mars’s Jezero Crater in February.
The BBC notes that the deep, 45km-wide depression, some 20 degrees north of the planet’s equator, appears to have held a lake billions of years ago. Because of this, scientists think Jezero’s sediments may hold traces of ancient microbial life – assuming biology ever took hold on Mars.
It reports that the mission team will be encouraged by the first pictures downlinked by Perseverance on Thursday, which clearly indicated rocky material from Rochette in the corer head at the entrance to the cylinder of the drill.