Thanks for the insight! The cleanliness aspect was a big topic on the Perseverance documentary I watched last night and it's amazing what they achieved.I actually had a miniscule involvement in that aspect of the mission as a consultant back in 2014, so I know something about it as opposed to anything else on the mission which I know almost nothing.
That said, I am not sure exactly what NASA currently considers confidential and what is open knowledge..
Here's their current web page on the sampling handling:
Perseverance Rover Components - NASA Science
Differences Between Perseverance and Curiosity The large robotic arm on the front of the rover differs from Curiosity’s: Curiosity collected and studied samples collected onsite with its tools, using the rover’s onboard laboratory. Perseverance collects rock cores for possible future advanced...mars.nasa.gov
In short, I do not believe they are expecting anything "alive" to actually be collected. Aside from the possibility of fossils or certain minerals known to mostly relate to living creatures, the main purpose of the samples is to look for organic matter.
To do that, the tubes had to be extraordinarily clean inside, both before and while leaving earth. That was my tiny involvement: how to make sure the tubes did not attract earthly organics inside of them, since metal tubes even opened to the cleanest air NASA had were quickly coated with organics (that's a well known issue in surface science). They had a specification for the maximum amount of earth organics that would be allowed to be present, which was not trivial to attain.
Anyway, they attained it (not using my proposed idea lol) and so now they have very clean, sealed metal tubes on Mars. The collected tubes are stored in the rover, and so will have full protection from UV and visible light, but not from deep penetrating x-rays and cosmic rays and such that might penetrate metal. However, most such things (like x-rays) will be attenuated by passing through the various metals parts, and so the interior exposure will be relatively mild, and perhaps no more than what they got on the surface of mars (or up to a few feet under the soil) for many, many years prior to collection.
I see, so the core sample tubes will be stored in the rover and not somewhere on the surface until the time comes to send them back to Earth. Means they have to carry around some extra weight, but likely not an issue as they're not burning up fuel on a race course
While this is a very interesting and necessary expedition which can help answer the question of whether life ever existed on Mars, I suspect that the exploration of subterranean lava tubes near sources of at least temporary liquid water would offer the best chance of finding life.
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