NASA’s Perseverance Rover Plans Next Mars Rock Sample Attempt, After First One
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will abrade the rock at the center of this image, allowing scientists and engineers to assess whether it would hold up to the rover’s more powerful sampling drill. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The rover will abrade a rock this week, allowing scientists and engineers to decide whether that target would withstand its powerful drill.
In its search for signs of ancient microbial life on 
A close-up of the rock, nicknamed “Rochette,” that the Perseverance science team will examine in order to determine whether to take a rock core sample from it. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The mission attempted to capture their first record of the crater floor on August 6 from a rock that ultimately proved too crumbly, breaking into powder and fragments of material too small to be retained in the sample tube before it was sealed and stored within the rover.
Perseverance has since trucked 1,493 feet (455 meters) to a ridge nicknamed “Citadelle” – French for “castle,” a reference to how this craggy spot overlooks Jezero Crater’s floor. The ridge is capped with a layer of rock that appears to resist wind erosion, a sign that it’s more likely to hold up during drilling.
“There are potentially older rocks in the ‘South Séítah’ region ahead of us, so having this younger sample can help us reconstruct the whole timeline of Jezero,” said Vivian Sun, one of the mission’s scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
This enhanced-color image from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance rover shows sample tube inside the coring bit after the Aug. 6 coring activity was completed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The team has added a step to the sampling process for this coming attempt: After using its Mastcam-Z camera system to peer inside the sample tube, the rover will pause the sampling sequence so the team can review…
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