Nasa’s newest Mars rover has successfully collected its first rock sample for return to Earth, after last month’s attempt came up empty.

The Perseverance rover’s chief engineer, Adam Stelzner, called it a perfect core sample.

“I’ve never been more happy to see a hole in a rock,” he tweeted on Thursday.

A month ago, Perseverance drilled into much softer rock, and the sample crumbled and did not get inside the titanium tube.

The rover drove half a mile to a better sampling spot to try again. Team members analysed data and pictures before declaring a success.

Perseverance arrived in February at Mars’ Jezero Crater — believed to be the home of a lush lakebed and river delta billions of years ago — in search of rocks that might hold evidence of ancient life.

Nasa plans to launch more spacecraft to retrieve the samples collected by Perseverance; engineers are hoping to return as many as three dozen samples in about a decade.