The US Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA has released details of the second attempt at ground sampling by the Perseverance rover.
On August 5, Perseverance made its first fence attempt and it failed. On August 11, NASA scientists published material describing the possible reason for the failure. The researchers agreed that the reason was not Perseverance malfunctions, but in the rock itself – it turned out to be more free-flowing, did not form a core, and simply spilled out back to the ground, leaving the tube empty.
Scientists spent almost two weeks investigating and drawing up a new plan. In the end, it was decided that the rover would move to a new location called the Citadel, where it would make a second attempt to collect a rock sample. This time, to ensure that the sample is indeed collected, the engineers will wait until they get images of the tube to make sure it is not empty before the tube is processed and placed in the bowels of the apparatus.
Louise Jandura, chief sampling engineer on the NASA team, described the first attempt on August 5:
We were just delighted that the equipment worked from start to finish without any failures. And then there was a surprise: “There is no sample? What do you mean without a sample?”
After discovering that the sample tube was empty, the mission staff used the rover’s cameras to analyze the remains of the hole drilled by the rover. A pile of dust formed around the hole, and spilled material could be seen at the bottom.
“It just wasn’t our kind of rock,” Jennifer Throsper, project leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), wrote in a blog post on Thursday:
Despite the fact that we have successfully collected over 100 images in various test rocks on Earth, our test set did not turn out to be a stone that behaved in this way. ”
Scientists will now make a second attempt at a more promising location with a breed suitable for fence. In total, Perseverance should collect 35 samples of Martian rocks, which are supposed to be delivered to Earth approximately in the 2030s.
Recall that Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18, 2021 and recently celebrated its first six months on the Red Planet. The rover is intended for exploration in the Jezero crater area. The rover has rather ambitious tasks in collecting samples, looking for signs of past microbial life, assessing viability and preparing for the landing of humans on Mars.
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