This picture from Jan. 7 exhibits the particles obstructing the bit carousel on NASA’s Perseverance rover.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
This story is a part of Welcome to Mars, our sequence exploring the purple planet.
Mars doesn’t take kindly to our robotic explorers. It chokes them with mud, roughs up their wheels and messes with their probes, and now it is throwing a brand new problem at NASA’s Perseverance rover. There’s some pebble-size particles getting in the best way of the machine’s rock pattern assortment system.
Everything went easily at first. On Dec. 29, Perseverance drilled right into a rock nicknamed Issole and extracted a pattern of it. “However, in the course of the switch of the bit that comprises the pattern into the rover’s bit carousel (which shops bits and passes tubes to the tube processing {hardware} contained in the rover), our sensors indicated an anomaly,” wrote Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching, in a weblog publish on Friday.
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The rover halted its sampling actions when it met uncommon resistance in the course of the strategy of stowing the pattern. As the rover crew expressed in a tweet on Friday, the upshot is the particles is stopping the rover’s robotic arm from correctly handing off the sample-filled tube for sealing and storage.
Perseverance is the primary rover to try to gather samples of Mars in sealed tubes. It’s a key a part of a mission that is additionally in search of out indicators of historic microbial life on the purple planet. NASA is planning to ship an formidable future mission to choose up the samples and convey them again to Earth for examine.
The rover crew commanded the machine to backtrack by pulling out the drill bit and tube. It snapped some pictures alongside the best way to assist diagnose the issue. “These most up-to-date downlinked pictures verify that contained in the bit carousel there are a couple of items of pebble-sized particles,” Jandura wrote. NASA expects the pebbles fell out of the pattern tube.
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While the particles presents a problem, there is not any cause to worry but. Jandura stated the designers of the bit carousel have thought-about this chance, however that it’ll take time to work by way of an answer that permits the pebbles to “exit in a managed and orderly style.”
NASA has confirmed resourceful on the subject of working by way of the purple planet’s mood tantrums. The Perseverance crew plans to take this one sluggish to make sure the sampling system is evident and able to go for future work.