NASA Perseverance Mars rover has crud obstructing its rock pattern system

This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series exploring the red planet.

Mars doesn’t take kindly to our robotic explorers. It chokes them with dust, 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 way in which of the machine’s rock pattern assortment system.

Every thing went easily at first. On Dec. 29, Perseverance drilled right into a rock nicknamed Issole and extracted a pattern of it. “Nonetheless, in the course of the switch of the bit that accommodates 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.

The rover halted its sampling actions when it met uncommon resistance in the course of the technique of stowing the pattern. As the rover team 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 is a key a part of a mission that is additionally looking for out indicators of historic microbial life on the purple planet. NASA is planning to ship an bold future mission to pick up the samples and convey them again to Earth for research. 

The rover crew commanded the machine to backtrack by pulling out the drill bit and tube. It snapped some photographs alongside the way in which to assist diagnose the issue. “These most up-to-date downlinked photographs affirm that contained in the bit carousel there are a number of items of pebble-sized particles,” Jandura wrote. NASA expects the pebbles fell out of the pattern tube.

Whereas the particles presents a problem, there isn’t any motive to stress but. Jandura mentioned the designers of the bit carousel have thought-about this risk, however that it’ll take time to work via an answer that permits the pebbles to “exit in a managed and orderly vogue.”

NASA has confirmed resourceful in terms of working via the purple planet’s mood tantrums. The Perseverance crew plans to take this one gradual to make sure the sampling system is evident and able to go for future work.