The Mars Sample Return Analogue Collection

Kurzfassung

The Mars 2020 Perseverance rover touched down in Jezero crater on February 18th, 2021, and sealed the first sample for a potential Mars Sample Return (MSR) later that summer. As of sol 1088, 23 rock cores have been collected across a diverse set of lithologies that span rock types from sedimentary to igneous. As the cache on Perseverance continues to grow, the overall portfolio of MSR expands, creating long lasting implications for a wide sector of the scientific community as well as supporting detailed analyses for generations to come. To best prepare for these precious samples to potentially return to Earth one day, NASA and ESA are jointly planning to create a MSR Analogue Collection that will be available to the community in the near future. In 2023, the "Rock Sample Team", appointed by the MSR Joint Science Office (JSO), recommended a suite of field sites for analogue samples that were primarily selected for engineering and technology development purposes [1]. In other words, these samples were nominated as candidates to test the physical behavior of the MSR rock cores during the tube opening and other procedures. The work by the Rock Sample Team has culminated in the collection of five analogue samples for the MSR Analogue Collection [Fig. 1]. To critically evaluate and/or supplement these engineering and technology targeted analogues, the Mars Sample Return Campaign Science Group (MCSG) set out to identify scientific analogues for addressing compositional changes that may occur after collecting the MSR samples.