The bundle of instruments known as SuperCam aboard the Perseverance Mars rover has collected its first samples while hunting for a past life on the red planet, mission scientists said Wednesday.
The return to Earth over years of the rocks and soil it retrieves “will give scientists the holy grail of planetary exploration,” Jean-Yves le Gall, president of France’s National Center for Space Studies (CNES), which largely defines mobile observatory. , responded via a YouTube broadcast.
These “pieces of Mars,” he said, may “finally answer this fascinating and fundamental question: Was there ever life anywhere other than Earth?”
After seven months in space, NASA’s Perseverance rover cautiously sat on Mars ground last month, sending back black and white images revealing the rocky fields of the Jezero crater, just north of the Martian equator.
“The critical part of this astrobiology mission is SuperCam,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy chief of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Mounted on the rover’s mast, the shoebox-sized gizmo is packed with spectrometers, a laser and an audio recording device to analyze the chemistry, mineralogy and molecular composition of Mars’s famous red surface.
SuperCam’s laser can zap objects smaller than a pencil point up to seven meters away, and makes it possible to observe spots that are out of reach of the rover’s robotic arm.
“The laser has a unique ability to clean up surface dust, giving all of its instruments a clear view of the targets,” said Roger Wiens, an engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and lead SuperCam investigator.
The mission suffered a serious accident before launch, revealed LANL’s Scott Robinson, who said more than 500 engineers and scientists contributed to the project.
“The mast unit optics were destroyed in a bizarre accident just four months before delivery,” he explains. “The team rushed to get spare parts to rebuild the telescope from scratch.”
The accident turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
A ‘freak accident’
While reassembling the unit, engineers discovered what Robinson described as a “Hubble-like” flaw in the original mirror.
Shortly after the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, operators realized that the observatory’s primary mirror had an aberration – later corrected – that affected the brightness of the images.
Scientists believe that about 3.5 billion years ago, the crater in which Perseverance landed was home to a river that flowed into a deep lake and deposited sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
The rover’s job is to collect more than two dozen rock and soil samples in sealed tubes, to be returned to Earth for analysis sometime in the 2030s.
SuperCam also takes close-ups of rock targets on Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / LANL / CNES / CNRS / ASU / MSSS)
With the size and weight of an SUV, Perseverance is equipped with a two-meter (seven-foot) robotic arm, 19 cameras, two microphones and other advanced instruments.
A small helicopter drone tucked under his belly will attempt to make the first powered flight on another planet in a few weeks.
One instrument on board is designed to make oxygen from Mars’s mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, something that would greatly facilitate human habitation.
Perseverance is the fifth rover to put wheels on Mars, all from NASA. The feat was first accomplished in 1997.
Its core mission will take just over two years, but the rover can also remain operational for a long time.
© Agence France-Presse