Oriented Bedrock Samples Drilled by the Perseverance Rover on Mars
- Creators
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Weiss, Benjamin P.
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Mansbach, Elias N.
- Carsten, Joseph L.
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Kaplan, Kyle W.
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Maki, Justin N.
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Wiens, Roger C.
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Bosak, Tanja
- Collins, Curtis L.
- Fentress, Jennifer
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Feinberg, Joshua M.
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Goreva, Yulia
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Wu, Megan Kennedy
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Estlin, Tara A.
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Klein, Douglas E.
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Kronyak, Rachel E.
- Moeller, Robert Carlos
- Peper, Nicholas
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Reyes‐Newell, Adriana
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Sephton, Mark A.
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Shuster, David L.
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Simon, Justin I.
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Williford, Kenneth H.
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Stack, Kathryn W.
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Farley, Kenneth A.1
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1.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
A key objective of the Perseverance rover mission is to acquire samples of Martian rocks for future return to Earth. Eventual laboratory analyses of these samples would address key questions about the evolution of the Martian climate, interior, and habitability. Many such investigations would benefit greatly from samples of Martian bedrock that are oriented in absolute Martian geographic coordinates. However, the Mars 2020 mission was designed without a requirement for orienting the samples. Here we describe a methodology that we developed for orienting rover drill cores in the Martian geographic frame and its application to Perseverance's first 20 rock samples. To orient the cores, three angles were measured: the azimuth and hade of the core pointing vector (i.e., vector oriented along the core axis) and the core roll (i.e., the solid body angle of rotation around the pointing vector). We estimated the core pointing vector from the attitude of the rover's Coring Drill during drilling. To orient the core roll, we used oriented images of asymmetric markings on the bedrock surface acquired with the rover's Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering (WATSON) camera. For most samples, these markings were in the form of natural features on the outcrop, while for four samples they were artificial ablation pits produced by the rover's SuperCam laser. These cores are the first geographically‐oriented (<2.7° 3σ total uncertainty) bedrock samples from another planetary body. This will enable a diversity of paleomagnetic, sedimentological, igneous, tectonic, and astrobiological studies on the returned samples.
Copyright and License (English)
© 2024 The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
Acknowledgement
We thank the full Mars 2020 team for the contributions to the development of the rover flight system and contributions to surface operations. B. P. W. and E. N. M. thanks the Mars 2020 Participating Scientist program (Grant 80NSSC20K0238) for funding and James Tanton for a providing us with a basic education about quaternions. Work at LANL and Purdue was funded by NASA contract NNH123ZDA018O. Some of this research was carried out at JPL, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004).
Contributions (English)
Benjamin P. Weiss and Elias N. Mansbach contributed equally to this work.
Conceptualization: Benjamin P. Weiss, Justin I. Simon, Kenneth H. Williford
Formal analysis: Benjamin P. Weiss, Elias N. Mansbach, Kyle W. Kaplan, Nicholas Peper
Funding acquisition: Benjamin P. Weiss, Roger C. Wiens
Data Availability (English)
All of the information and data newly presented in this contribution are available in the Planetary Data System (PDS) (https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/mars2020/). Rover instrument and calibration details can be found in the instrument payload citations included in the primary text: Allwood et al. (2020), Bell et al. (2021), Bhartia et al. (2021), Maurice et al. (2021), and Wiens et al. (2021). A MATLAB code that calculates the core azimuth, hade and roll using rover housekeeping data is supplied with the Data Set S1 (Code S1) and archived on the Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FF5R3V).
Code Availability (English)
A MATLAB code that calculates the core azimuth, hade and roll using rover housekeeping data is supplied with the Data Set S1 (Code S1) and archived on the Harvard Dataverse (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FF5R3V).
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Additional details
- ISSN
- 2333-5084
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NSSC20K0238
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- NNH123ZDA018O
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- 80NM0018D0004
- Caltech groups
- Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences