NASA Mars Perseverance Rover Shares Clear Photo of 10th Rock Sample After Completing Latest Mission

After digging into Martian rocks to collect samples, NASA released an extreme closeup of the 10th sample taken by the Mars Perseverance Rover.

Fans may discover closeups of Perseverance's materials in the rover's raw picture database, which the space agency typically gathers after digging.

The most recent sample, though, is noteworthy since the rover reached double digits and the sun touched the rock perfectly.

(Photo : NASA via Getty Images)
In this concept illustration provided by NASA, NASA's Perseverance (Mars 2020) rover uses its drill to core a rock sample and will store them in sealed tubes on the planet's surface for future missions to retrieve in the area known as Jezero crater on the planet Mars.

NASA Perseverance Rover Collects 10th Sample on Mars

NASA announced in a message sent through the Perseverance Mars rover's official Twitter account that it has successfully collected its tenth rock sample, a tiny rock core the size of a finger.

Despite being a historic occasion deserving of celebration, NASA made a remark that may imply that it was eclipsed by the publication of the first images collected by its newest, most advanced space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope.

However, the space agency did not think twice about sharing the image of the rock core that Perseverance extracted from a Martian rock in honor of it being the tenth Martian rock sample that the Martian rover had gathered.

The rock sample is now added to the nine others that Perseverance has already gathered in its search for evidence of water and life on Mars. Perseverance may still have 28 more samples to collect before completing its mission.

Big day for space science! From grand telescope views that #UnfoldTheUniverse, to extreme closeups of #SamplingMars, with rock cores barely the size of a pinky finger. I’ve now collected my 10th rock sample, seen here in the late afternoon Martian sun. pic.twitter.com/uOq5nABY8W
— NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover (@NASAPersevere) July 13, 2022

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The rover took its ninth sample last week at the same site. The rover's team suggested that this spot could still contain signs of previous habitation.

"Rock sample #9 is in the bag! (Well, in the tube, anyway.)," the rover team said in a tweet. "My team has waited years to get up close to this river delta and see what it might say about past life on Mars. This sample may get a one-way ticket back to Earth in the future!"

According to NASA, the Perseverance rover has 43 sample tubes on board to hold the materials it needs to collect from the Red Planet. 38 of the 43 tubes will be utilized to collect the rock samples.

The five additional sample tubes were described as "witness tubes" because they included substances that capture molecular and particle impurities.

On Mars, each of these five witness tubes will be opened in turn to observe the surrounding environment at sample collecting sites. The data will then be examined by NASA's science team so they can record any pollutants that could have been present during sample collection from the spacecraft or impurities that might have gone with the tube from Earth.

NASA Gives Percy New Task

Perseverance has lately broadened the scope of its missions and begun looking for a suitable landing site for a potential future sample return mission. In addition to providing a spot for a future vessel to land safely, the area would also be an appropriate setting for erecting the first launchpad ever on a planet other than Earth.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have jointly proposed the Mars Sample Return mission, which might fly to Mars in 2028 to collect the samples collected by Perseverance in Jezero Crater, Space.com reported. The samples would then be transported to an orbiter that could transport them to Earth via a tiny rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV).