NASA’s Perseverance rover called home for help after attempting to collect its latest Martian rock samples.
Following a failed attempt in August, the device managed a month later to secure a core only slightly thicker than a pencil from the Jezero Crater. Just before the new year, Perseverance successfully extracted another sample from a Mars rock, but then a problem occurred.
The December coring appears to have gone smoothly; the transfer, however, left something to be desired. According to Louise Jandura, NASA’s Chief Engineer for Sampling and Caching, an anomaly forced the rover to halt the caching procedure and call home for instructions.
“This is only the sixth time in human history a sample has been cored from a rock on a planet other than Earth,” Jandura wrote in a blog announcement. “So when we see something anomalous going on, we take it slow.”
The glitch occurred during what NASA calls “Coring Bit Dropoff,” when the drill bit—with its just-cored sample safely inside a tube—is guided out of the percussive drill and into the bit carousel. Previously, the coring bit travelled some 5.15 inches before meeting any resistance. This time, however, the sensor recorded higher resistance than usual around 0.4 inches earlier than expected.
Armed with additional data and imagery (which took about a week to arrive from the Red Planet), NASA scientists confirmed “a few pieces of pebble-sized debris” inside the bit carousel—likely fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube during Coring Bit Dropoff.
Since this is the team’s first debris removal attempt, they want to “take whatever time is necessary” to ensure the rover clears any pebbles “in a controlled and orderly fashion,” Jandura said.
“This is not the first curve Mars has thrown at us—just the latest,” she continued. “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. We are going to do that here. So that when we do hit the unpaved Martian road again, Perseverance sample collection is also ready to roll.”
