January 12, 2021: Perseverance Mars rover, NASA’s project to collect a dozen samples from the red planet, has faced a new problem, as there seem to be small rocks stuck inside it.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover seems to have encountered a problem. A few pebble-sized rocks are seemingly stuck inside it and it is preventing the rover from sealing up its titanium tube.
Perseverance landed on Mars on 18th February 2021, inside the 45 kilometer wide Jerezo crater. This landing site is said to have harboured a lake and a river delta billions of years ago. Perseverance’s mission is to find and collect signs of there being life on ancient Mars. These collected samples would then be returned to Earth for further study.
Perseverance has already sealed up five rock samples since the mission began in February 2021, and it began working on its sixth. The rover was drilling a rock called Issole, using its 7-foot long robotic arm.
However, things have not been going as smoothly as expected. While collecting its sixth rock sample since the mission began, the car-sized rover has not been able to seak up the titanium tube of this rock sample. This is because there seems to be pebble-sized debris stuck in the ‘bit carousel’, which is a rotating, wheel-like structure inside the rover. As soon as the news of an anomaly reached the mission team back in the United States, they instructed Perseverance to take images of the mechanism. The Perseverance team is working to resolve the issue as we speak.
"I recently captured my sixth rock core and have encountered a new challenge. Seems some pebble-sized debris is obstructing my robotic arm from handing off the tube for sealing/storage. More images and data to come. #SamplingMars takes perseverance," mission team members said on Friday via the Twitter account of Perseverance.
This isn’t the first sampling challenge faced by the rover on Mars. In fact, Perseverance was unable to collect any rock samples in its very first sampling effort in August. The Perseverance team concluded that the rock it tried to penetrate was too soft, crumbling into bits.