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The first attempt to take samples from the Perseverance rover did not go as planned.
The car-sized Perseverance landed inside the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater last February with two main tasks: to search for signs of past life on Mars, and to collect and cache samples for a future return to Earth.
The NASA rover drilled its first sample collection hole on Friday August 6, a milestone for the $ 2.7 billion mission. But data returned to Earth by Perseverance indicates that no rock or dirt from Mars entered the sample tube, NASA officials said Friday afternoon.
“While this is not the ‘hole in one’ we were hoping for, there is always a risk to innovate,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Missions Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. communicated. (The Perseverance mission is the first step in a campaign to return samples to Mars, which has never been done before.)
“I have no doubts that we have the right team working on this, and we will persevere towards a solution to ensure future success,” Zurbuchen added.
Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos from NASA’s Perseverance rover
As those words imply, this was not a watershed moment for Perseverance; the rover carries 43 collection tubes. The mission plan asks Perseverance to fill at least 20 of them with material extracted from holes he dug in Martian rock with the hammer drill at the end of his 2.1-meter-long robotic arm.
Data received from Perseverance indicates that the drill, which has a hollow coring bit, performed as expected, and the processing of the sample tube also appeared normal, NASA officials said.
“The sampling process is self-sustaining from start to finish,” said Jessica Samuels, head of the Perseverance surface mission, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, in the same statement. “One of the steps that occurs after placing a probe in the collection tube is to measure the volume of the sample. The probe did not meet the expected resistance that would be there if a sample were inside. of the tube. “
That result – a successfully drilled hole but an empty tube – was never encountered during testing of the sampling system on Earth, the Perseverance team said. via the rover’s official Twitter account.
“The initial thought is that the empty tube is more likely the result of the rock target not reacting as we expected during coring, and less likely a hardware issue with the sampling and caching system. “, Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance Project Manager, also from JPL. , said in the same statement. “Over the next few days, the team will be spending more time analyzing the data we have and also acquiring additional diagnostic data to help understand the root cause of the empty tube.”
This additional data will include detailed photos of the borehole, which Perseverance will take with the WATSON (wide-angle topographic sensor for operations and engineering) camera at the end of its arm, NASA officials said.
There is precedent for the unexpected properties of rock or earth that raise roadblocks for Martian robots. Perseverance’s older cousin, Curiosity, for example, drilled into rocks that turned out to be much harder or more brittle than mission team members had anticipated. And the thermal probe buried on NASA’s InSight Mars lander didn’t dig as deep as expected, possibly hampered by strangely dusty but cohesive dirt.
“I’ve been on every rover mission to Mars since the start, and this planet is always teaching us what we don’t know about it,” Trosper said. “One thing I have found is that it is not uncommon to have complications with complex activities for the first time.”
Mike Wall is the author of “The low“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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