NASA's Perseverance Mars rover fails to collect rock in search of alien life
NASA published the images of a small mound with a hole next to the rover, which was the first-ever dug into Mars by a robot. When the data was sent to the Earth by the rover, it indicated that no rock had been gathered.
FollowThe government space agency National Aeronautical and Space Administration's Perseverance drilled into the surface of Mars but unfortunately failed in its initial attempt to collect rock samples that would be picked up for analysis by scientists on Earth. NASA published the images of a small mound with a hole next to the rover, which was the first-ever dug into Mars by a robot. When the data was sent to the Earth by the rover, it indicated that no rock had been gathered.Â
The car-sized rover landed inside Mars' Jezero Crater in February. In a statement, the space agency said that the data sent to Earth by NASA's rover after the first attempt to 'collect a rock sample on Red planet' and 'sealed in a tube indicate that no rock was collected during the initial sampling activity'.
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The first step of the sampling process is to drill a hole which takes approximately 11 days, with an aim to look for signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in ancient lakebed deposits.
In a statement, the associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said that he is confident that they have the right team working on it. As per reports, experts believed that the Crater contains a deep lake 3.5 billion years ago, where the conditions may have been able to support extraterrestrial life.The agency has planned this mission to bring approximately 30 samples back to Earth to be analysed.
Currently, the rover is exploring two geologic units containing Crater's deepest and most ancient layers of exposed bedrock and other intriguing geologic features.
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