Pebble trouble: Debris obstruct NASA Perseverance Mars rover’s sample collection

Posted by harsh sultayia on January 10th, 2022

If you idea dirt storms and difficult terrains gave Mars rovers a tough time, right here is greater news – even some portions of pebble-sized particles can halt its functioning. On January 8, NASA tweeted that particles have been obstructing the robot arm from handing off the tube for sealing/storage.

Last month, the Perseverance rover efficiently cored and extracted a pattern from a Mars rock. While processing the rock samples, the rover’s sensors recorded resistance or drag. “This is best the sixth time in human records a pattern has been cored from a rock on a planet aside from Earth, so while we see some thing anomalous going on, we take it slow,” wrote Louise Jandura, Chief Engineer for Sampling and Caching at NASA/JPL, in a blog.

The crew commanded the rover to take greater pictures to have a look at what took place and the way it may be fixed. The trendy pictures confirmed that fragments of cored rock fell out of the pattern tube for the duration of dropoff. This avoided the bit from seating absolutely withinside the bit carousel.

“This isn\'t always the primary curve Mars has thrown at us – simply the trendy. One element we’ve observed is that once the engineering assignment is masses of tens of thousands and thousands of miles away (Mars is presently 215 million miles from Earth), it can pay to take it slow and be thorough. We are going to do this right here. So that once we do hit the unpaved Martian street again, Perseverance pattern series is likewise equipped to roll,” provides Jandura.

Launched on July 30, 2020, the rover landed at the Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. Its key goal is astrobiology, consisting of the look for symptoms and symptoms of historical microbial life. It may even acquire rock and soil samples to be lower back to Earth with the aid of using a destiny NASA mission. In October, a tool aboard the rover turned into capable of produce oxygen from the Martian ecosystem for the primary time. Images despatched with the aid of using Perseverance have helped researchers verify that Mars’ Jezero crater turned into as soon as a lake.