The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has confirmed that its Perseverance rover has succeeded in collecting its first rock sample on Mars.
“I’ve got it!” the space agency tweeted in the early hours of yesterday, alongside a photograph of a rock core slightly thicker than a pencil inside a sample tube.
Nasa said last week that it thought it had accomplished the feat, but poorly-lit photographs taken by the rover meant that the team operating the mission could not be certain about whether the sample had stayed inside its tube.
It had to retake the pictures in better lighting, but sending back the data can take several days.
“With better lighting down the sample tube, you can see the rock core I collected is still in there,” said Nasa in the new tweet, adding that the next stage would be sealing this tube and storing it.
The target was a briefcase-sized rock nicknamed “Rochette” from a ridgeline that is half a mile (900m) long.
Perseverance uses a drill and a hollow coring bit at the end of its 7’-long (2m) robotic arm to extract samples.
Its first attempt at taking a sample in August failed after the rock was too crumbly to withstand the robot’s drill.
This image released by Nasa shows the drill hole from Perseverance’s second sample-collection attempt, in this composite of two images taken on September 1 by one of the rover’s navigation cameras.
