Everything seemed to be working perfectly, but when the tube that was supposed to hold the material was opened, it was empty. Engineers are now trying to figure out what went wrong when the Perseverance rover tried to collect the first rock fragment.
Everything seemed to be working fine, the U.S. space agency's Perseverance rover had captured the first rock fragment from the planet Mars, but when the metal tube that was supposed to hold the material was opened, there was nothing inside. Engineers are now trying to figure out what might have gone wrong regarding the robot's mission. Until the machine was opened, everything seemed to have worked perfectly. Now the team of specialists believes that the blame for the failure can be traced to the particular properties of the rock that was attempted to be taken.
Why Perseverance failed to capture the fragment
According to scientists, some images and telemetry could help solve the mystery about the failure to capture the rock. The initial hypothesis is that "the empty tube was the result of the rock material not reacting in the expected manner during coring," said Jennifer Trosper, Perseverance project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who believes instead it less likely may have been a hardware problem with the sampling and caching system. "In the coming days, the team will spend more time analyzing the data we have and acquiring some additional diagnostic data," he added, "to support our understanding of the root cause of the empty tube."
Perseverance has a drilling and coring system on the end of its 2-meter-long robotic arm. This is capable of cutting and retrieving finger-sized rock samples that are then passed to a processing unit inside the rover's belly that packages and seals them in titanium cylinders. Before sealing, however, a camera and probe are used to assess the amount of material recovered, and when this was done, during coring in recent days, it became apparent that the sample was not there.
This is not the first time that components of the Red Planet's surface have proven difficult to obtain with the robots' analytical tools. NASA's 2007 Phoenix lander already found that local soils in the "Arctic" region of Mars had a sticky consistency that made it tricky to capture a sample and bring it to the robot's on-board lab. Instead, the agency's InSight 2018 lander struggled mightily without, in the end, being able to drive an instrument to test the soil temperature. The subsurface was unexpectedly tough.
Perseverance landed on Mars in February, in a 45-kilometer-wide crater called Jezero. Its mission is to try to determine whether life on the Red Planet exists, or ever existed. One of the ways it hopes to do this is by collecting a series of rock samples to send back to Earth. The initial attempt targeted a rock core that is thought to represent the basic material of Jezero. Scientists hope to accurately date any sample captured in order to identify a chronology of what happened next in the crater. From satellite imagery, it appears that Jezero may have been home to a lake many billions of years ago, a type of environment that could have been conducive to the proliferation of microorganisms.
While trying to find a solution to what may have caused the failure of the Perseverance rover's mission, Nasa has already kicked off the selection process to apply to become citizens of Mars.
Stefania Bernardini