Rock specimen appears to have crumbled when it was picked up
The first attempt to collect a sample from the surface of Mars using NASA’s Perseverance rover ended in failure on 6 August. Fortunately, the fault seems to lie with the rock, not the rover, meaning Perseverance is still on track to complete its main mission of creating caches of samples for a future spacecraft to return to Earth.
The rover made its first attempt at acquiring a sample after 164 sols (Martian days) on the surface. Initial feedback showed everything had gone to plan – the drill reached a depth of 7cm and the sample tube was successfully stored. When the team received a more detailed update six hours later, however, things didn’t look as optimistic.
“Within minutes, the team noted that the volume probe indicated no sample was in the tube,” said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance’s project manager, in an online report. “We quickly switched to problem-solving mode – once again trying to solve another problem tossed our way from the surface of Mars.”
It seems the rock was far more powdery than anything encountered during testing and crumbled during collection. The team have now turned their eyes towards a region named Citadelle, further along Perseverance’s planned route, where it is hoped the rocks have a more solid texture.
“We will first abrade the selected rock and use the science instruments to confirm (to the best of our ability) that the new target is likely to result in a core after the sampling process,” says Trosper. The sampling routine will now also image the tube while it is still in the drill to confirm a sample was collected.
Comment by Chris Lintott
Perseverance isn’t the first lander to struggle with getting Martian soil where it needs to be – the stuff has been driving scientists mad for decades. I remember filming with the Phoenix team, as their joy at getting the craft safely down in the Martian arctic turned – slightly – to frustration: its soil sample had simply stuck to the lander’s scoop rather than trickling into the instrument it was intended for.
More recently, the InSight lander’s ‘mole’ –a heat probe designed to dig deep into the ground – failed to bite into the surface, leaving it stranded, a victim of the tendency for the soil to clump together.
All of these problems could be solved in seconds by an astronaut capable of wielding a brush (or, I guess, a spade in the case of the mole). It may be that the best argument for sending people to the Red Planet is just that its soil is quite so annoying! Chris Lintott co-presents The Sky at Night