NASA's Perseverance rover has been busy gathering bits of Mars — rock cores the size of chalk sticks, clusters of broken fragments no bigger than pencil erasers, and even grains of dust fine enough to sit on the tip of a needle.
Now, scientists are preparing for the next step: cataloguing these samples before potentially bringing them home with NASA's Mars Sample Return program. While NASA is still weighing its options for bringing those precious bits of the Red Planet home, scientists have documented in a recent study what they know so far about the first samples of soil, regolith, and loose sediment collected by the Perseverance rover.
