Washington:
NASA’s Perseverance rover has begun drilling into the surface of Mars and will gather rock samples to be picked up by future missions for evaluation by scientists on Earth.
The US space agency published photos Friday of a tiny mound with a hole in its center next to the rover — the very first ever dug into the Red Planet by a robot.
“Sample collection has begun!” tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate.
The drill hole is the very first step of a sampling procedure that is anticipated to take about 11 days, with the aim of hunting for indicators of ancient microbial life that may possibly have been preserved in ancient lakebed deposits.
Scientists also hope to greater fully grasp the Martian geology.
The mission took off from Florida a tiny more than a year ago and Perseverance, which is the size of a substantial family vehicle, landed on February 18 in the Jezero Crater.
Scientists think the crater contained a deep lake 3.5 billion years ago, exactly where the circumstances may possibly have been capable to help extraterrestrial life.
NASA plans a mission to bring about 30 samples back to Earth in the 2030s, to be analyzed by instruments that are a great deal more sophisticated than these that can be brought to Mars at present.
(This story has not been edited by TheSpuzz employees and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)