Space.com quoted the mission's Twitter announcement on March 8 as saying that the robot drilled into a new Martian rock and removed the core. This is the 7th sample that Perseverance has collected since making landfall on the surface of Jezero on the Red planet in February 2021.
Collecting samples to send to Earth in the future is one of Perseverance's two main missions, along with hunting for signs of life on ancient Mars. The Jezero is 45km wide, with a lake and a vast ancient plains, so this is a great place to carry out those missions, the mission members said.
On Earth, the continental plains have done a great job of preserving signs of life as we know, as well as the basic structures of life, organic compounds containing carbon. Therefore, the members in charge of Perseverance are eager to explore the remains of the Jezero mainland and they plan to study them soon.
Perseverance spent its first year on Mars (calculated by the year of the Earth) exploring the surface of the cape to the south and west of the landfall site - named after science fiction author Octavia Butler.
The Perseverance group is planning the journey of self-driving cars with the help of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. If everything goes as planned, Perseverance will end the collection after storing a few dozen samples. These samples will be brought to Earth as early as 2031, by a joint campaign of NASA and the European Space Agency.
