NASA’s Perseverance Collects First Mars Sample of New Science Campaign

[Waspie_Dwarf]

NASA’s Perseverance Collects First Mars Sample of New Science Campaign

Quote

This image shows the rocky outcrop the Perseverance science team calls “Berea” after the NASA Mars rover extracted a rock core (right) and abraded a circular patch (left). The image was taken by the rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument on March 30, 2023, the 749th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The rover continues its hunt for rocks worthy of bringing to Earth for further study.

NASA’s Perseverance rover cored and stored the first sample of the mission’s newest science campaign on Thursday, March 30. With each campaign, the team explores and studies a new area. On this one, the rover is exploring the top of Jezero Crater’s delta. Perseverance has collected a total of 19 samples and three witness tubes, and it recently deposited 10 tubes as a backup cache on the Martian surface as part of the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign.

Read More: NASA

 

[Dejarma]

how much money has been spent on these mars missions over the years?

[Tatetopa]

Looks like about $16 billion dollars, by NASA at least since roughly 2004.

Just for fun, I found that Pfizer profits from  Viagra for the same time period were $25.7 billion.  Perspective anyway.

 

 

 

 

[Waspie_Dwarf]

32 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

how much money has been spent on these mars missions over the years?

Not enough.

[Dejarma]

28 minutes ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

Not enough.

not enough for what? mars is a dead planet it seems. how is this money spent an advantage to us? how will it help humanity?

[Waspie_Dwarf]

28 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

not enough for what?

To carry out the levels of exploration that Mars warrants. 54 years after we landed astronauts on the Moon and we still haven't landed humans on Mars.

 

31 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

mars is a dead planet it seems.

It seems to who? We still don't know the answer to that. Maybe we would if NASA has had a sufficient budget to explore Mars in more detail.

 

32 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

how is this money spent an advantage to us?

What apart from all the advances in technology, geology, meteorology, volcanology, mineralogy, climatography, etc?

 

36 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

how will it help humanity?

Ask Elon Musk, after all he's spending billions to eventually colonise Mars. As he points out, if humanity doesn't become multi-planetary it will become extinct. Is avoiding the eventual annihilation of the species a big enough benefit to humanity for you?

[Dejarma]

4 minutes ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

It seems to who? We still don't know the answer to that.

we do, it's a dead planet.. well compared to earth... or are there people out there that know something I/ we don't do you think?

i feel all this time effort  brain power & money could be better spent at the moment .. just my opinion for what it's worth 

 

[Dejarma]

12 minutes ago, Waspie_Dwarf said:

Ask Elon Musk, after all he's spending billions to eventually colonise Mars

these billions could be better spent on solving the reasons why we would need to colonise Mars 

[Waspie_Dwarf]

13 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

we do, it's a dead planet.. well compared to earth...

I love it when people shift the goal posts. "Compared to Earth" was not your claim "Compared to Earth" is also irrelevant. The discovery of a single bacteria or even a single fossil would be one of the greatest scientific and philosophical discoveries of all time. It would fundamentally affect how we view ourselves and our place in the universe.

 

16 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

or are there people out there that know something I/ we don't do you think?

Judging by your poor arguments in this topic I would suggest that there are a considerable number of people out there that know something you don't. There are also a lot of people out there that want to know even more but are hampered by the small budget NASA has for Martian exploration.

 

22 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

i feel all this time effort  brain power & money could be better spent at the moment ..

It is being spent at the moment. It is ALWAYS the correct moment for humanity to expand it's boundaries both physically and scientifically. Any civilisation that fails to do that will eventually die.

 

18 minutes ago, Dejarma said:

these billions could be better spent on solving the reasons why we would need to colonise Mars

No, they really couldn't. We are one comet strike away from oblivion, ask a dinosaur.. oh, you can't, they didn't have a space programme. Space exploration is the ONLY way to protect us from that. It's often said that there is no back-up plan, no planet B. In a few years that will not necessarily be true. It's never a bad thing to have a plan B, even whilst working on plan A.

Besides there is this thing called multi-tasking. There is no reason why humanity can't do something about the human driven problems we face AND explore space.

NASA's ENTIRE budget accounts for less that 0.5% of US federal budget, with around 30% of that spent on ALL robotic exploration, that just 15¢ for every $100 dollars the US government spends. In the grand scheme of things that's a trivial amount.

[Saru]

9 hours ago, Dejarma said:

these billions could be better spent on solving the reasons why we would need to colonise Mars 

Many of the technologies we depend upon on a daily basis were made possible by the space program - it has multiple benefits.

Also, as Waspie mentioned, space exploration can be done as well as solving other problems we face - it's not an either/or situation.