Perseverance's sample tubes will create a depot accessible by later missions.
The depot will serve as a backup to Perseverance, which will retain other tubes for a future Sample Retrieval Lander.
Perseverance is scheduled to place the first of 10 sample tubes on the surface on December 19.
Perseverance has filled 21 of its 43 tubes so far.
After completing duplicate sampling at sites, Perseverance will stop double sampling and continue to build the cache of samples retained on the rover.
NASA announced on 2022-10-28 that the agencies agreed to deposit some of the 14 samples collected by Perseverance to date at Three Forks in Jezero Crater.
NASA’s Perseverance rover mission cost more than $2,000,000,000.
The Perseverance rover mission to Mars cost more than $2,000,000,000.
Ingenuity lost communications with the Perseverance rover on 2022-05-03 and contact was reestablished on 2022-05-05 after the rover entered a low-power state when its battery levels dropped below a lower limit.
Jason Achilles Mezilis entered the space sector in 2016 and secured a role helping design the microphone for NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover after conducting extensive research and cold calls to people at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
A 2028 ExoMars launch would require descent engines similar in size to those produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne for NASA Mars missions such as Curiosity and Perseverance because ESA lacks European descent engines of the right size for ExoMars.
NASA implemented the 2011 decadal survey flagship recommendation as the Mars 2020 mission, which placed the Perseverance rover on Mars to collect and cache samples.
The Atlas V 541 configuration has launched missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, carried the GOES-R and GOES-S satellites, and most recently launched the Mars 2020 mission with the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter.
Teledyne’s Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG) provides the electrical power that operates NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers.
Launches of a NASA-led rover and an ESA rover to pick up Perseverance samples and an ESA-led orbiter for return to Earth are planned to launch no earlier than 2026 with samples returning in 2031.
The two follow-on missions to retrieve and return Perseverance’s samples are planned to launch no earlier than 2026 and to return samples to Earth as soon as 2031.
Airborne Systems, a U.S. company that produced the parachute for NASA’s Perseverance rover, manufactured the 15-meter parachute tested in late June.
Ingenuity performed its eighth flight on Mars on 2021-06-21, traveling 160 m and landing at a new site 134 m from the Perseverance rover.
CAES supplied components for NASA’s Perseverance rover that landed on Mars on 2021-02-18.
NASA’s 2021-04-29 milestone list included the Perseverance Mars rover landing, a commercial crew handover on the International Space Station, and the Green Run test of the Space Launch System core stage.