Experts from NASA officially announced that the Perseverance rover is experiencing certain problems with the removal of soil rocks from the surface of the Red Planet – all the fault, as it turned out, was the stones that got into the body of the mechanism.
“On Wednesday, December 29 (Sol 306), the Perseverance rover successfully took a soil sample of the Martian rock – the procedure, judging by the readings of the device, was successful. However, during the transfer of the drill containing soil samples to a special carousel mechanism (stores the drills and transfers the samples in special tubes to the equipment that is responsible for analyzing the rock inside the rover), the rover’s sensors recorded some kind of anomaly. Accordingly, the rover did what it was supposed to do according to the protocol – suspended the procedure for unloading the rock into the carousel and reported the situation to Earth, ”- an official statement from NASA.
This means that earlier, when loading the obtained samples, the drill with the Martian rock traveled a distance of 13.1 centimeters before the built-in sensors registered the resistance in contact with the carousel structure. But this time the sensor registered the resistance earlier than usual, by about a centimeter. To understand the problem, NASA specialists requested additional information and images from the rover in order to determine the anomaly. Having received a photo from the rover, the experts confirmed their guess – stones got inside the carousel mechanism, which caused an anomaly when unloading the samples.
NASA believes that these stones got into the mechanism when the previous batch of Martian rock was unloaded – they simply fell out of the tube when the drill was dropped into a special container. And, of course, now these same stones do not allow the mechanism to complete the process of loading a new batch of Martian soil – and this, as experts reminded, is only the sixth time in human history when a soil sample was not obtained on Earth. And although the designers of NASA said that the carousel mechanism can still work, even if there are rather large debris inside, scientists will still try to remove these stones in order to continue working as usual.
The problem with this whole process is also that Mars is too far from the Earth – some data reach specialists after a week. This means that it may take some time to fix the problem with the stones, but scientists are very optimistic.
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