NASA’s Perseverance rover hit a snag while trying to capture its latest piece of rock from Mars, with a pebble-sized bit of debris stopping it from storing the sample.
The SUV-sized vehicle has been on the Red Planet since February 2021, and is slowly trundling through the Jezero Crater taking rock samples for later retrieval.
The Perseverance team, tweeting as the rover, wrote: ‘I recently captured my sixth rock core and have encountered a new challenge. Seems some pebble-sized debris is obstructing my robotic arm from handing off the tube for sealing/storage.’
It retrieved the sample on December 29, or sol 306 on Mars, where it successfully cored and extracted the sample, but the transfer to the tube failed.
On January 7, NASA discovered there was a small piece of rock inside the entrance to the tube docking area, blocking it from entering.
The US space agency is now working on removing the debris, but as Mars is at one of its furthest points from Earth, at 215 million miles away, there is a delay.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has been on the Red Planet since February 2021, and is slowly trundling through the Jezero Crater taking rock samples. The pebble-sized debris is pictured
The SUV-sized vehicle has captured its sixth rock in total, but a piece of ‘pebble-sized debris’ stopped it from storing the sample
The Perseverance team, tweeting as the rover, wrote: ‘I recently captured my sixth rock core and have encountered a new challenge. Seems some pebble-sized debris is obstructing my robotic arm from handing off the tube for sealing/storage’
When NASA looked at the data coming back to Earth after the samples were taken, experts found that the coring of the rock, named Issole, went smoothly.
Unfortunately, the transfer of the rock sample into the tube didn’t go as expected, with an anomaly spotted in the tube transfer.
The rover did as it was designed to do — halting the caching procedure and calling home for further instructions. NASA is currently investigating the cause.
‘This is only the 6th time in human history a sample has been cored from a rock on a planet other than Earth,’ NASA engineers wrote in a blog post, adding ‘when we see something anomalous going on, we take it slow.’
The anomaly occurred during ‘Coring Bit Dropoff’, according to NASA, which is when the drill bit, with sample tube and just-cored sample inside, is guided out of the drill at the end of the robotic arm, and into the bit carousel on the rover’s chassis.
When processing previous rock samples, the bit had travelled 5.15 inches before sensors on the rover recorded expected levels of resistance.
In this case, the resistance kicked in 0.4 inches earlier than expected, and at a much higher level of resistance than would normally be expected.
NASA experts sent a request to the rover for it to send extra imagery back of the tube, rover and collection area — to better understand the anomaly.
‘Because we are presently operating through a set of “restricted Sols” in which the latency of the data restricts the type of activities we can perform on Mars, it has taken about a week to receive the additional diagnostic data needed to understand this anomaly,’ engineers wrote in a blog post.
Armed with that data set, the team sent up a command to extract the drill bit and sample-filled tube from the carousel and undock the robotic arm.
They extracted the drill bit on January 6, and images revealed that there were two pieces of pebble-sized debris within the carousel.
When NASA looked at the data coming back to Earth after the samples were taken, they found that the coring of the rock, named Issole, went smoothly
The anomaly occurred during ‘Coring Bit Dropoff’, according to NASA, which is when the drill bit, with sample tube and just-cored sample inside, is guided out of the drill at the end of the robotic arm, and into the bit carousel on the rover’s chassis
The team is confident that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube at the time of Coring Bit Dropoff, and that they prevented the bit from connecting properly with the carousel.
‘The designers of the bit carousel did take into consideration the ability to continue to successfully operate with debris,’ the engineers wrote.
‘However, this is the first time we are doing a debris removal and we want to take whatever time is necessary to ensure these pebbles exit in a controlled and orderly fashion.’
‘One thing we’ve found is that when the engineering challenge is hundreds of millions of miles away, Mars is currently 215 million miles from Earth, it pays to take your time and be thorough.
The SUV-sized rover touched down on Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021, following a seven minutes of terror descent to the Martian surface
The team is confident that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube at the time of Coring Bit Dropoff, and that they prevented the bit from connecting properly with the carousel
‘We are going to do that here. So that when we do hit the un-paved Martian road again, Perseverance sample collection is also ready to roll.’
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life.
The rover will characterise the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
The rover won’t return the samples to Earth, but rather collect them for return by a future NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) joint mission this decade.