Martian dust won’t bury the Perseverance rover’s rock sample tubes
Neither dust nor wind nor dark of night will disturb new caches of precious Martian samples on the Red Planet.
This month, NASAs Perseverance robber has dropped lightsaber-shaped caches of material on the surface of Mars to lie in wait as backup for a future monster return mission. Perseverance collects two samples at each location and takes one set. If the rover can’t take the monsters in its belly to a waiting spacecraft itself, two retrieve helicopters will instead lug the backup surface tubes to the return missile in the 2030s.
The epic joint NASA-European mission will empower researchers Soil to examine the tube samples closely signatures of life. Since the retrieval mission isn’t expected to land until the 2030s, officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said on Twitter they’ve heard public concerns about wind or dust damaging the tubes or making the caches difficult to find.
“My team is not worried,” said the official Perseverance account tweeted (opens in new tab) Dec. 23, along with a series of evidence showing why the tubes won’t travel far — and how NASA tracks their deposition sites as the ultimate backup.
Related: 12 amazing photos from the Perseverance rover’s first year on Mars
Unlike the fictional, powerful windstorm depicted at the beginning of “The Martian” (2015), the Red Planet has gentle gusts of wind. Because of his thin atmosphere at only one-hundredth the pressure of Earth at sea level, the Martian wind is largely limited to picking up fine grains of sand.
“Winds around here can pick up *speed* but they don’t pick up much *stuff.* Think fast, but not strong,” the Perseverance account tweeted. In practical terms, winds are not the threat to nuclear-powered missions like Perseverance. The NASA Curiosity rover, for example, is still running after 10 Soil years on Mars with only a thin layer of dust covering the machines, the report said.
That said, dust cover on solar panels (as NASA recently concluded Mars lander InSight mission) can pose a long-term threat to exploration, as they slowly clog the solar energy supply – without a lucky gust of wind. “It’s the ultimate end of more than one solar explorer,” the Twitter thread noted of the dust.
Related: Can we save Mars robots from death by dust?
What about something smaller that sits low on the surface? See this ribbon cable leading to @NASAInSight’s seismometer? After four years: a thin layer of dust, but easy to recognize. (The pile of dirt you see over part of it is only there because InSight put it there on purpose.) pic.twitter.com/UdpHVY18eADecember 23, 2022
Even for tubes that lie low to the surface, NASA expects them to be “easy to spot” based on examples such as older images from InSight. After four Earth years on the Red Planet’s soil, InSight’s cables, though dusty, were still recognizable.
“Not only do we expect the sample tubes to be uncapped,” the Perseverance account tweeted alongside a map, “but I also document very carefully where exactly I put them. That would be a problem.”
The backup mission is expected to arrive in nine years, or around 2031. Launch opportunities between Earth and Mars occur about every two years, giving multiple opportunities to send a mission there before 2040 – assuming funding for the monster return mission and technology development is progressing according to plan.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why am I taller (opens in new tab)(ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a space medicine book. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
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