So does the sky crane delivery system, but it works.
It’s all about specialization. Do you get more mining done if you send a person into a mine with a drill, a pick, and a bucket, and have him bring the bucket back every time he fills it, or is it better to have a second person whose only job is to bring the buckets back?
A sample return mission is going to have to be as streamlined as possible. Every pound of equipment that they have to land on Mars is a pound of propellant they can’t have to lift back off of Mars, which means less capacity for returning samples.
I would actually think that even that would be best as two seperate landers. One as a rover to collect the samples, and one just a vehicle for returning them to orbit. Preferably with a 3rd spacecraft, one that stays in orbit, takes the samples from the launch vehicle, and returns them to Earth.
I’d say that we would know pretty well where they are when they are taken. We don’t exactly have GPS on Mars yet, but we can navigate with reasonable precision.
That makes sense on, say, the moon - where you know the vial will stay on the surface pretty much forever unless an asteroid hits nearby - but on Mars isn’t there a risk of the vials being buried by sand during a storm?
It doesn’t sound like they are going to be ejecting them and leaving them to the elements, it sounds like it actually has a storage area on the rover it will be keeping them in.
During the live stream, there was a description of the recapture process as involving a ‘fetch rover’, which is repeated here:
Over the next two years, Percy, as it is nicknamed, will use its 7-foot (2-meter) arm to drill down and collect rock samples with possible signs of bygone microscopic life. Three to four dozen chalk-size samples will be sealed in tubes and set aside on Mars to be retrieved by a fetch rover and brought homeward by another rocket ship. The goal is to get them back to Earth as early as 2031.
So this sounds like the samples will indeed be stored on Mars somewhere.
The wikipedia site corroborates this:
There’s even an artist’s mockup of how the fetch rover (so, are we gonna name it ‘Spot’?) is retrieving the samples:
But there’s also apparently a plan for Percy to return the samples:
If Mars 2020 is still operational, it could also deliver samples to the landing site.
Seems it would make sense for the plan to work this way: if Perseverance becomes inoperational—which we probably have to expect in the next ten years—it would probably be hard to retrieve the samples from the rover’s storage; plus, it will just as much get covered in dust.
But I haven’t found anything explicitly addressing the ‘but won’t it get covered under a layer of dust?’-problem yet…
EDIT: Here’s a more detailed look at the sample return concept:
“One of the cool new technologies we want for the rover is to be able to detect the canisters visually from a distance and then drive over and automatically pick them up”
So, it seems like they’re expecting the sample to be visible at a distance. I guess there’s less of an issue with dust buildup than we think? I mean, after all, there’s lots of exposed Martian rock, too, that hasn’t gotten covered in dust…
That’s what I was thinking until I went to go look it up, and it mentioned placing them in storage on the rover.
Not sure which is correct, or if I’m misunderstanding something.
But, assuming that they are being left on the ground, they are going to be metal objects, not that hard to locate with a metal detector. Probably heavy enough they aren’t going to get blown all over the place.
Thrilling, and for so many reasons! Congrats to JPL again!
Second time (in history) that the skycrane system has been used for landing. I felt most concerned about this stage of the landing, seeing that it only worked one time previously. For it to have a 100% success rate is reassuring.
Fortunately, Bernie Sanders wasn’t actually seen on Mars by the hazcam.
(As mentioned above) The Mars sample return series of projects is now officially kicked off*, with Perseverance being the first part, the “cache” rover, bundling up samples of material (soil, rocks, atmosphere) to be carried back to Earth in a future mission. Those upcoming missions are so awesome: they include a lander with a two-stage, solid fuel rocket to carry those samples back into orbit, then an orbiter to rendezvous with the sample container and fly the stuff back to Earth.
*If this landing had failed they could just try again with a new rover, but it did not fail!
The talking heads at JPL were all beaming just after landing…they weren’t making these feelings up. Felt like quite the breath of fresh air, after the last few months of tension.
It’ll be interesting to see how things go once mission planner start figuring Space X and reduced launch costs into things.
When it costs so much to send something to Mars, it needs to have a very high reliability, and I would guess that getting from 90% to 99.9% increases the cost very substantially.
If you can send ten for the cost of one now, then reducing the cost of ensuring reliability lowers the cost of the whole system.
If you can send ten landers, and lose one or two, getting eight or nine on the surface, for the cost of sending one now, we can extend our exploration substantially.
True, but I hate to think how long it would have taken. It took eight years to design and build Perseverance, which was basically a second-generation rover after Curiosity. Plus there would have been a careful post-mortem to find out what failed and make sure it didn’t happen again. Not to mention all the resources that would be taken up by the second try. It would have set back the whole unmanned space program by many years. And on top of that, a few too many failures would create a lack of confidence among those who provide the massive funding for these things. So this success was really and truly important from every standpoint!
Surely rocks have been covered in dust, and then uncovered again, as winds and dust storms move things around. Here’s a remarkable pic of one of the occasional dust storms that grows to become planet-wide, completely obscuring the surface. During storms like that, Opportunity and Spirit have had to go into hibernation for lack of sunlight. It’s hard to believe that tiny canisters left on the surface wouldn’t be at risk of being lost to dust cover.
