Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Mars Perseverance rover shakes loose troublesome pebbles

Georgina Torbet
By

NASA’s Perseverance rover made history last year when it collected a sample of Mars rock for the first time. But after several successful attempts to collect further samples, the rover ran into a problem late in December when pebbles became lodged inside the machinery for collecting samples. Now, NASA has shared an update on progress on dislodging the pebbles, and the signs are looking good for the rover’s continuing mission.

The problem arose when Perseverance went to make its seventh sample collection. Everything went fine with the rover drilling into the rock and capturing a sample in a tube. But when it went to put the tube into the carousel inside its chassis, sensors detected unusual resistance. It turned out some pebbles had likely fallen out of the sample tube and into the carousel, gumming it up. The team decided to tip out the sample and rotate the carousel to try to dislodge the pebbles.

Related Videos

An animated GIF depicts the Martian surface below the Perseverance rover, showing the results of a percussive drill test to clear cored-rock fragments from one of the rover’s sample tubes.
An animated GIF depicts the Martian surface below the Perseverance rover, showing the results of the January 15, 2022, percussive drill test to clear cored-rock fragments from one of the rover’s sample tubes. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Having made these recovery steps, cameras on the rover show that two of the pebbles have been dislodged successfully. In a mission update, NASA confirmed that the upper two pebbles had been ejected by rotating the bit carousel. There are still two pebbles remaining below the carousel, but tests performed on Earth suggest that these won’t pose a significant problem for future sample collection.  The team also used the rover’s robotic arm and its rotary-percussive drill to dump the remaining rocks in the original sample tube back onto the Martian surface, making space for a full sample to be collected at a later date.

From here, the team will continue testing to make sure the rover can operate with the two pebbles still inside. “The team is still reviewing the data and discussing next steps,” Rick Welch, Deputy Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in an update. “Like all Mars missions, we’ve had some unexpected challenges. Each time, the team and our rover have risen to the occasion. We expect the same result this time – by taking incremental steps, analyzing results, and then moving on, we plan to fully resolve this challenge and get back to exploration and sampling at Jezero Crater.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
NASA’s Mars helicopter aces longest flight in almost a year
NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.

NASA’s Mars helicopter recently aced its 43rd flight, one that turned out to be its longest in almost a year.

During the February 11 flight, Ingenuity traveled 1,280 feet (390 meters) across the martian surface for 146 seconds, reaching a maximum altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) while reaching a top speed of 8.9 mph (4 meters per second). The flight was a repositioning mission in preparation for providing further assistance to NASA’s Perseverance rover as it continues to explore Jezero Crater.

Read more
Perseverance Mars rover shares detailed panorama of sample depot
The site of Perseverance's sample depot.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been busy creating what the space agency recently said was “humanity’s first sample depot on another planet.”

The depot, which is essentially a flat patch of land, contains 10 titanium tubes holding samples of martian rock and dust collected by NASA’s rover in the two years since it landed on the red planet.

Read more
Mars Curiosity rover finds evidence of water where it was expected to be dry
Curiosity Rover

The key to understanding whether Mars was ever habitable is water. For life as we know it to thrive, liquid water needs to be present -- and we know that even though it is now dry, there was once liquid water on the surface of Mars. However, the history of water on Mars is complex, and scientists are still debating exactly how long water was present there and when the planet dried up.

And it's about to get more complex. Recently, the Curiosity rover has made an intriguing discovery suggesting that water was once present in an area that scientists had thought would be dry.

Read more