NASA Mars Rover Begins Collecting Rock In Search Of Alien Life

The US space agency published images Friday of a small mound with a hole in its center next to the rover -- the first ever dug into the Red Planet by a robot.

NASA's Perseverance rover has begun drilling into the surface of Mars and will collect rock samples to be picked up by future missions for analysis by scientists on Earth. The US space agency published images Friday of a small mound with a hole in its center next to the rover -- the first ever dug into the Red Planet by a robot. "Sample collection has begun!" tweeted Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate. The drill hole is the first step of a sampling process that is expected to take about 11 days, with the aim of looking for signs of ancient microbial life that may have been preserved in ancient lakebed deposits.