Once at the Lander, the samples will be launched into orbit by rocket, then retrieved by an orbiter and sent to Earth. Updated plans eliminate the Fetch Rover (yellow ellipse) and will instead use Sample Retrieval Helicopters to bring the samples to the Sample Return Lander. This is what the Mars Sample Return mission looked like in 2019. There they’ll be retrieved by another spacecraft, the Earth Return Orbiter, that will send them back to Earth. NASA and the ESA now plan for Perseverance itself to deliver the samples to the Sample Return Lander, where a small rocket will launch the samples into orbit. But the helicopters and the depot samples are just a backup plan. The Sample Return mission will still include a Sample Return Lander, but instead of a fetch rover, two helicopters will collect the samples. The helicopters would collect cached sample tubes with their robotic arms, one at a time, and return them to the Sample Return Lander. This artist’s illustration shows what a Sample Return Helicopter might look like. But with the success of the Ingenuity Helicopter, that plan has changed. Formerly, the plan included a fetch rover to collect the samples and a Sample Return Lander. NASA and the ESA have refined the Mars Sample Return mission architecture over time. One of each sample will be placed in a surface depot as backup, and one will be kept inside Perseverance. Perseverance collects duplicate samples from each of its sampling locations. The orange circles represent areas where a Sample Recovery Helicopter could safely operate to acquire the sample tubes. This map shows where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will be dropping 10 samples that a future mission could pick up. “You can’t simply drop them in a big pile because the recovery helicopters are designed to interact with only one tube at a time,” said Cook. “The first one is for the Sample Retrieval Lander, but then we need 10 more in the vicinity for our Sample Recovery Helicopters to perform takeoffs and landings, and driving too.” “Up to now, Mars missions required just one good landing zone we need 11,” said Richard Cook, Mars Sample Return program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. It’s even more critical when the site is on another planet. That means the entire depot area must contain 11 separate landing spots.Ĭomplicated operations like this need to be planned out precisely, and without adequate maneuvering room, the whole endeavour can become much more complicated than it needs to be and can even risk failure. Since they’ll be retrieved by helicopters at a later date, they have to be positioned so that the helicopters can access them one at a time. The tubes aren’t simply left on the ground. Placing the samples on the surface is a detailed process. The large majority of Perseverance’s 18 samples so far are rock core samples. The bulk of them are rock core samples, but there are regolith and atmospheric samples as well. Perseverance has collected 18 of 38 samples or 47%. There’s still a long time until the Perseverance rover’s samples are returned to Earth in 2033, but the rover is collecting samples and starting to cache them in a depot.
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