Planetary Sample Robot: Apollo Rakes to ABB Lab Arms

Every piece of another world that reaches a laboratory has passed through a tool first, whether an astronaut's rake, a lander's drill or a rover's arm. A planetary sample robot does that work where people cannot go, scooping and coring samples, sealing them and handing them on without contaminating them. This post follows the job from the Apollo crews and the Soviet Luna landers to the arms on Viking, Curiosity and Perseverance. It covers Japan's MMX mission, launched on 19 October to bring back soil from the Martian moon Phobos, the stalled plan to return Perseverance's tubes, and where ABB's laboratory robots could help once samples reach Earth.

Perseverance takes a selfie with some of the sample tubes it left at the Three Forks depot in Jezero crater, January 2023. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS (public domain)

How Apollo crews and Luna landers brought back the Moon

The first samples were gathered by hand. Six Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972 returned about 381 kg of lunar material, which has been processed into more than 110,000 catalogued samples. Astronauts used hammers, rakes, scoops, tongs and core tubes, and on 11 December 1972 Harrison Schmitt raked rock chips at the Taurus-Littrow site during Apollo 17's first moonwalk. Back on Earth the rocks went to the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, with a smaller backup collection at White Sands. Most are stored in nitrogen to keep moisture out and are handled only indirectly, with special tools.

Harrison Schmitt collects lunar rake samples at Taurus-Littrow during Apollo 17, 11 December 1972. Photo: Eugene Cernan / NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Soviet Union did it with robots. Its Luna 16 lander brought back 101 grams in 1970, Luna 20 returned 30 grams in 1972 and Luna 24 returned 170 grams in 1976, less than half a kilogram in all. In 1971 the Soviet academician A. P. Vinogradov handed Luna samples to NASA's Lee Scherer in Moscow as part of an exchange of lunar material. China's robotic landers have since gone further. Chang'e 5 returned 1,731 grams in 2020, and Chang'e 6 brought back 1,935.3 grams in 2024, the first samples from the far side of the Moon.

A Luna 16 sample return spacecraft on display in a Moscow museum. Photo: Goodvint / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Mars needed arms that could work alone. Viking 1 landed on 20 July 1976 and Viking 2 on 3 September, each with a sampler arm carrying a collector head, a temperature sensor and a magnet. The arms dug trenches to feed soil to experiments inside the landers. On 25 September 1976 Viking 2's sampler trenched an area just 8 by 9 inches, surrounded by rocks, to get soil for its molecular analysis experiment while a lander camera watched. Curiosity, which landed in Gale crater on 6 August 2012, has a 2.1 m arm with a percussion drill, a brush and tools for scooping and sieving. It drilled its first rock, John Klein, in February 2013.

Viking 2's surface sampler trenches soil among rocks for the molecular analysis experiment, September 1976. Photo: NASA/JPL (public domain)

Perseverance, MMX and the stalled sample return

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater on 18 February 2021 to collect samples for return. Its 2.1 m arm carries a coring drill, and a second, smaller arm hidden inside the rover, the Sample Handling Assembly, moves the chalk-sized cores between the stations of the caching system on the rover's underside. The rover has 43 tubes, three of them witness tubes that will not come back. By July 2025, 33 had been filled, and ten were left on the ground as backups at the Three Forks depot.

The Sample Handling Assembly, the small arm inside Perseverance that moves sample tubes between stations. Photo: NASA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In July 2024 Perseverance drilled a sample called Sapphire Canyon from a spotted rock named Cheyava Falls, and members of the science team call it a potential biosignature. It sits sealed inside the rover. The NASA and ESA Mars Sample Return plan meant to fetch it grew to as much as $11 billion, with the return date pushed to 2040, and NASA's 2026 budget request moved to end it after about $2.5 billion had been spent. ESA had already hired Leonardo to build the Sample Transfer Arm, a 2.5 metre robot with seven degrees of freedom meant to pick up the tubes and load them into a rocket on Mars. On 30 August NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the samples will be retrieved, by robots or by astronauts.

The first sample tube Perseverance left on the Martian surface, imaged by the WATSON camera on its arm, December 2022. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS (public domain)

Japan's mission is already on its way. MMX, short for Martian Moons eXploration, left Tanegashima on an H3 rocket on 19 October 2026. When its lander touches down on Phobos in late 2028 or 2029, a robotic arm will fire a coring sampler into the ground to collect more than 10 grams from deeper than 2 cm. A second sampler near a landing foot will puff gas to push soil into a container, and the arm will then move both canisters into the return capsule. The lander gets two hours on the surface, and the samples are due in the Australian desert in 2031. China's Tianwen-3, due to launch in 2028, plans a lander with a drill that reaches 2 metres underground and a helicopter that can also gather rocks.

Phobos, the Martian moon MMX will sample, seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in March 2008. Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

On Earth the robots hand over to curators. In October 2023 astromaterials processor Mari Montoya and the OSIRIS-REx curation team at NASA's Johnson Space Center lifted the spacecraft's sampler head off its canister base and flipped it over inside a glovebox. China plans to build a planetary protection laboratory for the Tianwen-3 samples. Each new collection adds to this kind of work. Apollo's 381 kg alone became more than 110,000 catalogued samples, all handled indirectly.

OSIRIS-REx curation staff set the sampler head down inside a canister glovebox at NASA's Johnson Space Center, October 2023. Photo: NASA/Kimberly Allums via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Where planetary sample robots go next

ABB robots are not part of any sample return mission I could find, but the lab work that follows a return looks like work they already do. In 2019 ABB opened a healthcare research hub at the Texas Medical Center in Houston and showed a mobile YuMi concept meant to load and unload centrifuges, pipette liquids and pick up and sort test tubes next to lab staff, as our post on hospital lab automation describes. In a sample lab, a dual-arm robot like YuMi could take over repetitive transfers between containers and instruments inside a sealed cabinet. That is a possibility; no space agency has announced such a project.

ABB's mobile YuMi laboratory robot concept tends a centrifuge next to a lab worker, shown when ABB opened its Houston hub in 2019. Photo: ABB

Factories and labs can already buy this kind of automation. In February 2024 ABB Robotics and Mettler-Toledo agreed to combine ABB's cobots with Mettler's LabX software, which runs inside ABB's OmniCore controllers and orchestrates robot workflows for pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, semiconductors and batteries. ESA's transfer arm was designed to see, feel and make its own decisions in dust and in temperatures from minus 130 to plus 70 degrees C, and the Danish Technological Institute is among the companies building it with Leonardo. Our post on satellite manufacturing covers the factory side of space hardware. For people at home the payoff is an answer: Purdue's Briony Horgan calls the Perseverance samples the best current chance to learn whether life is common or Earth is unique.

An ABB GoFa cobot works with METTLER TOLEDO lab instruments at ABB's healthcare research hub, 2024. Photo: ABB

Money comes first. Mars Sample Return collapsed under its cost, and even MMX, a single lander mission, costs $578 million. Contamination is next: samples must stay clean from the moment a drill bites to the day a curator opens a container, which is why lunar rocks still sit in nitrogen and are handled with tools. People are the third limit. ABB said in 2024 that lab automation is held back by a gap in the skills needed to handle the technology and by the complexity of setting up sensitive workflows.

A lab worker beside ABB's dual-arm YuMi robot, which ABB develops for repetitive and delicate lab tasks. Photo: ABB

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com