The instrument package known as the SuperCam aboard the Perseverance Mars rover collected the first samples in the hunt for past life on the red planet, scientists said on Wednesday.
The return to Earth years ago of the rocks and soil it recovers “will give scientists the Holy Grail of planetary exploration,” Jean-Yves le Gall, president of the National Center for Space Studies (CNES) in France, who built in mostly the mobile observer, commented through a YouTube broadcast.
He said that these “pieces of Mars” can “finally answer this fascinating and fundamental question: has there ever been life other than Earth?”
After seven months in space, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed lightly on Martian soil last month and sent back black-and-white images revealing the rocky fields of Jezero Crater, just north of the Mars equator.
“The critical component of this astrobiology mission is SuperCam,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, deputy head of NASA’s Scientific Mission Directorate.
Mounted on the rover’s mast, the shoe box-sized device is full of spectrometers, a laser and an audio recording device to analyze the chemistry, mineralogy and molecular composition of Mars’ famous red surface.
The SuperCam laser can make objects smaller than a pencil point from a distance of up to seven meters (20 feet) and allows the observation of spots that cannot be touched by the rover’s robot arm.
“The laser is capable of remotely removing dust from the surface, giving all its instruments a clear view of the targets,” said Roger Wiens, an engineer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and chief investigator of SuperCam.
The mission suffered a major crash before takeoff, revealed Scott Robinson of LANL, who said more than 500 engineers and scientists contributed to the project.
“The optical elements of the mast were destroyed in a strange accident just four months before delivery,” he explained. “The team rushed to gather spare parts to rebuild the telescope from scratch.”
The accident turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
A “strange accident”
When reassembling the unit, the engineers discovered what Robinson described as a “Hubble-like” defect in the original mirror.
Shortly after the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, operators realized that the observer’s primary mirror had an aberration – later corrected – that affected the clarity of the images.
Scientists believe that about 3.5 billion years ago, the crater in which Perseverance landed housed a river that flowed into a deep lake, depositing sediment in a fan-shaped delta.
The rover is tasked with collecting more than two dozen samples of rock and soil in sealed tubes, to be sent back to Earth sometime in the 2030s for analysis.
SuperCam also takes close-up photos of stone targets on Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / LANL / CNES / CNRS / ASU / MSSS)
About the size and weight of an SUV, Perseverance is equipped with a two-meter (19 meters) robotic arm, 19 cameras, two microphones, as well as other state-of-the-art instruments.
A small helicopter drone tucked under its belly will attempt its first motor flight to another planet in a few weeks.
An instrument on board is designed to produce oxygen from the main atmosphere of Mars’ carbon dioxide, which would greatly facilitate human habitation.
Perseverance is the fifth rover to land on Mars, all from NASA. The phase was first carried out in 1997.
Its basic mission lasts a little over two years, but the rover could remain operational for much longer.
© Agence France-Presse