NASA’s Endurance rover has taken a series of selfies to celebrate its first collection of samples on the surface of Mars. These images have now been released by NASA and show the probe of this organization in front of some sample tubes.
On January 22 (Bahman 2), coinciding with the 682nd Martian day of this probe’s mission, Perseverance took a series of selfies of itself, which NASA has now stitched together and published. This rover so far 10 sample tubes have worked on this planet and some of them can be seen in this image. However, NASA has challenged users to guess how many sample tubes are seen in this image. This probe had previously published the first photo of the storage of a sample on Mars.
The Endurance rover will make sure the samples return to Earth
In the animation above, Endurance first looks down at his front pipe sample and then proudly stares at the camera. NASA says storing samples on the surface of Mars is an important step to ensure that Mission to return samples will be to the ground. This project is jointly carried out by NASA and the European Space Agency and is currently under development.
Endurance is the first mission to do such a thing, and if successful, it could pave the way for more missions in the future, even to other planets. These storage tanks hold one of two copies of samples collected by NASA’s Mars rover so that they can still be extracted if the Endurance itself fails to deliver the samples to the robotic lander of the return missions.
As Endurance collects samples from Mars, it sends a sampling tube into its belly. There, a small robotic arm seals the tube so nothing can get in or out. Then these pipes are stored in surface tanks or stored in the belly of this robot.
