NASA's Perseverance Rover Captures an Extreme Closeup of Mars' Tenth Sample.
The James Webb Space Telescope is now receiving all of the attention in space, and rightfully so.
Its initial photographs have astonished, awed, captivated, and befuddled, making it easy to forget that only a year and a half ago.
nasa landed a car-sized rover called Perseverance on a planet that lay, on average, roughly 140 million miles away.
NASA released an extreme closeup of its latest sample, the 10th, on Tuesday, and it's just as fascinating as Webb's photos from earlier today.
NASA always takes closeups of Perseverance's samples after drilling and stores them in the rover's raw picture database.
It felt extra wonderful since the rover reached double digits and the sun touched the rock just perfectly.
As NASA points out in its tweet, the samples are approximately the thickness of a pinky finger, but that doesn't imply they're lacking in information.
Scientists intend to investigate the samples over the next decade, studying their chemical composition and even looking for indications of ancient life... if we can bring the samples back home.
The samples will be kept in the rover's belly until NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) dispatch a spacecraft to Mars to retrieve them.
Perseverance is expected to dump them on Martian soil, where another rover will pick them up, transport them to a rocket, and bring them back to Earth, similar to an interplanetary mail service.