Picture of Perseverance Mars rover and two holes can be seen where the rover used its robotic arm to drill rock core samples.

Mars rover takes big steps in its most important mission

For all of the challenges Perseverance overcame in its first year on the red planet, the most difficult may be yet to come: returning samples of Mars to Earth.

NASA’s Perseverance rover made this selfie near a rock nicknamed Rochette on September 10, 2021, after drilling two chalk-size rock cores—the first successful samples the rover collected.
Photograph composed of 57 images by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Published February 18, 2022
8 min read

A set of white tubes hangs on a hand-crafted wood board on the wall of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Each one stands for a titanium twin hundreds of millions of miles away that has been filled with a bit of Martian rock or air and tucked into the belly of a robotic geologist.

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