NASA's Perseverance rover took the first steps in decades of dreaming back samples on Mars.

NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars has started collecting extraordinary rocks.

The rover, which is designed to search for signs of ancient life on Mars and to package up material for a future sample-return mission, made its first two successful sampling maneuvers on Monday and Wednesday (Sept. 6 and Sept. 8). NASA scientists describing the collection were delighted with their knowledge of the two rock cores to date.

"This is a truly historic achievement, the very first rock cores collected on another terrestrial planet — it's amazing," Meenakshi Wadhwa, Mars sample return principal scientist, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and Arizona State University, said during a news conference held Friday (Sept. 10).

"In our scientific community, we've been talking about returning samples from Mars for decades, and now it's starting to be real," Wadhwa said. "These first samples will be part of dozens of other samples that will be taken by the rover Perseverance."

The successes of this week came after a first attempt at sampling a month earlier did not quite work out according to plan. On 6 August, the rover Perseverance drilled into a carefully selected rock, but could not hide a rock core. The scientists who resolved the problem determined that the rock was unexpectedly friable, thwarting the rover's sampling mechanism.

At that time, the mission team's number one priority was to confirm that the sampling mechanism was operating correctly. After analyzing the initial failure, Perseverance personnel pointed the rover to a new target that appeared to be less weathered and more robust, Jessica Samuels, the Perseverance surface mission manager at JPL, said during the news conference.

And the second rock selection of the rover team, nicknamed "Rochette", was found to be more receptive to the equipment of Perseverance. Meanwhile, the excitement of the engineers had extended to the team's geologists. "As we assessed this target, the science team found that this target was also very valuable," said Mr. Samuels.

As a result, the mission team decided to attempt to collect not one but two samples of Rochette, which the team is now referring to as "Montdenier" and "Montagnac." Perseverance is equipped with 43 sample tubes, and because the rover will set up one or more stores of tubes during its mission, scientists have budgeted for taking multiple cores of rocks that they want to be positive can make it back to Earth, Perseverance deputy scientist Katie Stack Morgan of JPL said during the news conference.

Due to the previously missed sampling, the human directors of Perseverance asked the robot to take extra pictures before trying to store the first sample, Montdenier, adding to the uncertainty.

"We were rewarded for our patience," said Matt Robinson, Head of Strategic Perseverance Sampling Operations at JPL, at the press conference, sharing an image. "Looking at the drill in the tube, you can see a beautiful nucleus. At the time, our team was extremely pleased. I have no words to speak of how we felt."

The scientists are also ecstatic. The two new samples come from the same rock in the Jezero crater, where the rover explores an area that, a long time ago, sheltered a lake. That rock is likely relatively young, and so far, scientists have determined that that rock is basaltic, which means it may represent cooled lava that flowed along the Red Planet's surface. Moreover, Persévérance detected salt in the two nuclei.

According to a NASA news release, these compounds may have formed from groundwater circulating in the rock or from evaporating surface water. In addition, the salt might have locked away tiny bubbles of water as the crystal formed, according to the statement, which scientists may eventually be able to study as a sort of time capsule within the rock.

Since landing on the Red Planet in February, the Perseverance rover has spent nearly 200 Martian days (a little more than 200 Earth days) on the surface and has traveled about 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers), Samuels said. However, because of Mars solar conjunction, when the sun comes between Earth and Mars and makes communication with the Red Planet difficult, Perseverance and the rest of NASA's Mars fleet will pause work for several weeks beginning by early October, according to NASA.

But while the humans behind Persévérance are celebrating the two new samples and preparing for a scientific hiatus, they are also planning the rover's next moves.

Perseverance is heading for a region known by scientists as South Séítah, which the rover's airborne companion, the Ingenuity helicopter, has been exploring on reconnaissance flights. Mission scientists are intrigued by the rugged landscape of the area's crests, dunes, and rock shards, and the rock is probably older than Rochette, according to NASA.

The mission hopes to spend its time on Mars laying the groundwork for a future multispacecraft mission that NASA and the European Space Agency have begun developing to bring scientists their first pristine pieces of the Red Planet, perhaps by 2031. The sample collection is a milestone for not just Perseverance, but the agency's Mars program writ broad, Lori Glaze, the head of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said during the news conference.

And Persévérance is also taking a step backward, building on NASA's decades of experience exploring Mars, she said. "Everything we do builds on what we've learned before," he said. "We stand upon the shoulders of giants to be where we are today."