NASA's Perseverance rover has successfully taken its first sample of Martian rock and securely placed it in a container to be returned to Earth.
"I've got it," the US space agency tweeted on behalf of the six-wheeled rover on Sunday, together with a picture of a piece of rock safely stowed in a container connected to the robot's drill.
Perseverance had drilled into a small rock on the surface of Mars on September 2, but due to poor lighting conditions, the engineers at the control centre in southern California were initially unable to see whether the sample was really in the extraction tube.
New photos in better light now show that the drilling mission was successful.
The sample, which is only slightly thicker than a pencil, will later be sent to Earth and studied. Among other things, NASA wants to find out whether the rock contains evidence of earlier microbial life on the Red Planet.
A first drilling attempt failed in August. According to NASA, the rover's technology worked perfectly at the time, but the rock was not solid enough and only produced small, powdery fragments that could not be filled into the sample tube.
Perseverance landed on Mars at the end of February following a development programme lasting eight years and costing around 2.5 billion dollars.
