NASA Perseverance Mars Rover Has A Debris Obstructing Its Rock Sample Collection
The Mars Perseverance Rover’s sample collection has run into a snag. NASA has said that the rover stopped catching samples after some pebble-sized debris created problems for the machine
The Mars Perseverance Rover’s sample collection has run into a trouble. NASA has said that the rover stopped caching samples after some pebble-sized debris created problems for the machine. The rover encountered the anomaly on December 29th, but the mission team had to wait until January 6th to send a command to extract the drill bit, undock the robot arm from the carousel and take images to verify what happened. NASA Asteroid Watch 2022: Find Details of Next Five Asteroids Approaching Earth and Their Estimate Date
The obstacles are believed to be pebbles that fell out of the sample tube when dropping off the coring bit, preventing that bit from sitting neatly in the carousel. The storage is crucial for NASA's plans to eventually return the samples to Earth.
The Perseverance team sought more data to understand the nature of the anomaly. A week later, they found some pebble-sized debris obstructing the smooth functioning of the probe's robotic arm.
Louise Jandura, the chief engineer for sampling and caching at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a post that the team is confident that these debris fell out of the storage while collecting the rock samples.
NASA engineers are now trying to remove the debris in an orderly fashion. Since this is the first time they are doing a debris removal, they want to take whatever time is necessary to do it. And they will be evaluating the latest data set over the weekend.James Webb Space Telescope’s Secondary Mirror Deployed And Locked, Confirms NASA
The rover team commanded the machine to backtrack by pulling out the drill bit and tube. It snapped some images along the way to help diagnose the problem. "These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris," Jandura wrote. NASA expects the pebbles fell out of the sample tube.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 09, 2022 06:48 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).