NASA’s Perseverance rover appears to be back on track to collect Martian rock samples after scientists remotely helped shake free a few pebbles stuck in its bit carousel.
By rotating the bit carousel one way, then turning it back the other, the remote team were able to expel two stones back onto the surface of Mars, as evidenced by a set of under-rover images.
Another pair of pebbles, however, remain below the bit carousel, though NASA doesn’t seem too concerned. “Some of the initial trials performed on our testbed here on Earth indicate that the location of the two leftover pebbles may not pose a significant problem with bit carousel operation,” Rick Welch, deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained in a blog post. Still, the team is conducting tests and keeping an eye on the bit carousel to be safe.
Considering some of the sample had already been lost, the team used Perseverance’s robotic arm and rotary-percussive drill to dump the rest of the collected rocks back onto the Martian surface, making way for a fresh, full sample.
The rover in September secured a core only slightly thicker than a pencil from the Jezero Crater, and successfully extracted another sample from a Mars rock just before the new year. But while the coring appears to have gone smoothly, the transfer did not go as planned.
