USA: On February 18, NASA's Perseverance Rover successfully completed its second year on Mars. The six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover has been collecting samples of Mars and studying the Red Planet's geological features since arriving there in 2021.
The sample depot was the first of its kind to be built on another planet, and is one of the achievements the rover is proud of.
In 2021, the Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance rover, also known as Percy, touched down at Jezero Crater on Mars.
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Currently, the rover is on its extended mission. It recently completed its primary mission, lasting one Martian year, or about 687 Earth days.
One of the rover's achievements was in 2021, when it broke the previous record for the longest drive on a single Martian day.
There are seven scientific instruments on the rover and each has provided important new information. Percy, for example, has taken over 1,66,000 photographs. Its SuperCam instrument's microphone captured 662 audio files.
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Remember that "Martian Dust Devil" was captured by the same device? In addition, Percy's ground-penetrating radar device has conducted 6,76,828 soundings so far to study underground rock layers.
Not only this. As part of the MOXIE technique (Mars Oxygen In-situ Resource Utilization Experiment), "92.11 grams of oxygen were produced, and the Gas Dust Removal Tool (gDRT) collected the gas to clean residual dust and particles from rock-abrasive activities." puffed 62 times," according to the report.
Additionally, the MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyser) instrument has accumulated weather data for a total of 15,769.1 hours.
Ken Farley, project scientist for Perseverance, said, "Anniversaries are a time for reflection and celebration, and the Perseverance team is doing a lot of both.
With persistence, hundreds of fascinating geologic features have been investigated, data collected, 15 rock cores collected, and the first sample depot on another world established." On February 15, the rover launched its upcoming science launched the campaign, which became known as the "Upper Fan."
Perseverance has collected two regolith samples and one atmospheric sample in addition to rock cores, bringing the total to 18. Five "witness tubes" are also carried by the rover to help the team determine whether any of the sealed sample tubes may contain impurities from Earth.
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The Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign, which is being run by NASA and ESA, aims to return samples of Mars to Earth for in-depth analysis, with a sample depot built by the rover as a backup.
On Mars, Percy has taken duplicate samples. One set was used to build the sample depot, and the other is safely stored in the rover's belly.