NASA rover Perseverance collects first Martian rock sample

LOS ANGELES: NASA's Mars science rover Perseverance has collected and stashed away the first of numerous mineral samples that the U.S. space agency hopes to retrieve from the surface of the Red Planet for analysis on Earth.

Tools attached to Perseverance and operated by mission specialists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles drilled a rock core slightly thicker than a pencil from an ancient Martian lake bed, then hermetically sealed it in a titanium specimen tube inside the rover. The feat, accomplished on Sept. 1 and publicly confirmed by NASA late on Monday, marked the first such mineral sample obtained from the surface of another planet, according to the space agency.