NASA Perseverance will attempt a second shovelful of dirt on Mars, hoping the rocks don’t collapse

NASA’s Martian rover Perseverance is gearing up for another attempt, in the coming weeks, to scavenge Martian rocks after its first attempt earlier this month did not go as engineers expected. The rover’s sample caching arm worked, engineers said, but the sample tube was found to be empty.

Now the rover, a science lab on wheels that landed on Mars in February, will travel to a new location called the Citadel for a second attempt to collect its first rock sample. This time around, to ensure that a sample is actually taken, engineers will wait for images of the sample tube to return before it is processed and stowed away in the rover’s belly.

“We were just super excited that the hardware worked from start to finish without any faults. And then there was this surprise: “No sample? What do you mean by no sample? “Louise Jandura, chief sampling and caching engineer for NASA’s Perseverance team, said of the first attempt on August 5. “So quickly, after it went down, we started to investigate.”

The rock that Perseverance’s sampling drill dug was not as solid as scientists thought. What was supposed to be a fairly solid core of rock turned out to be crumbly powder that slipped out of the rover’s sample tube. After discovering that the sample tube was empty, mission personnel used the rover’s cameras to analyze the remains of the hole drilled by Perseverance. They thought the mound of dust around the hole and some material at the bottom of the hole was what had escaped.

“The rock just wasn’t our kind of rock,” Jennifer Trosper, project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “Although we were successful in acquiring over 100 cores from a range of different test rocks on Earth, we had not encountered any rock in our test suite that behaved this way.”

Perseverance’s five-joint sampling arm extends from the front of the rover to a rock of interest with a large shoebox-sized head, or turret, at the end that weighs 100 pounds . This head contains a hollow drill bit, formerly called a rotary impact corer, which drills through rock and traps material inside a tube, which is stored in the rover and processed in another tube until it be ready to be left somewhere on the Martian surface.

The drill bit used for Perseverance’s first sampling attempt is used to collect rock cores. Some of the rover’s 9 drills are better suited for collecting regolith, the most crumbly and dirt-like material engineers have accidentally encountered on the first attempt to sample.

Perseverance’s mission to collect up to 35 Martian rock samples is the first step in a three-pronged effort to get those samples back to Earth in the 2030s. The rocks, stored in tiny sample tubes the size of chalk, would represent the first pristine samples of Mars ever captured and returned to Earth by humans. Perseverance will leave the tubes somewhere on the Martian surface for a future NASA robot to pick up and launch into orbit on Mars, where another spacecraft built by the European Space Agency will grab it and transport it. up to the house.

NASA engineers spent nearly a decade designing and building the rover’s sampling system, which Perseverance chief engineer Adam Steltzner described as “the most complicated and sophisticated thing ever. that we know how to build “.