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posted by FatPhil on Tuesday August 10 2021, @08:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can't-dig-that dept.

Perseverance fails at first sample collection? At Endgadget

NASA's Perseverance rover just had a rare misstep. The space agency has revealed that the robotic vehicle failed to collect Mars rock samples during its first attempt. While the percussive drill, coring bit and sample tube processing worked "as intended," a probe indicated that the tube was empty — not exactly what scientists were expecting when everything else checked out.

Scientists are still investigating what happened and may not have an answer for a few days. Perseverance project manager Jennifer Trosper said the team suspected the rock might have reacted in an unexpected way during the coring process. The equipment is likely fine, in other words.

The Martian surface has created problems more than once. The Phoenix Lander had trouble gathering "sticky" soil in 2008, for instance, while Curiosity and InSight have also had trouble cracking into rocks and the surface itself.

Of course, there is not yet a mechanism in place to retrieve the tubes, if they managed to get filled. But if at first you do not succeed, practice saves stitching early worms.

And secondly:

NASA's newest Mars rover has come up empty in its first attempt to pick up a rock sample to eventually be brought back to Earth

The rover Perseverance drilled into the floor of the planet's Jezero Crater to extract a finger-sized sample from slabs of flat rocks. The drill seemed to work as intended, but it appeared no rock made it into the sample tube, the agency said Friday.

[...] The next step will be using a camera mounted on a robotic arm to inspect inside the hole "and see what's down there," said NASA project scientist Ken Farley. He said they might see the broken rock core, or might discover the sample had turned to sand. "The rock properties might be different than[sic] we expected," he said.

[...] NASA aims to collect up to 31 samples in tubes and stash them for pickup in about a decade. Plans call for the samples to be brought to Earth in the early 2030s in another mission with the European Space Agency.

Full story: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/mars-rover-empty-1st-rock-sample-79326299


Original Submission 1 Original Submission 2

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NASA’s Perseverance to Attempt Second Mars Soil Scoop, Hoping Rocks Don’t ‘Crumble’ 22 comments

NASA's Perseverance to attempt second Mars soil scoop, hoping rocks don't 'crumble':

NASA's Perseverance rover will drive to a new location in the coming weeks to drill for its first Mars soil sample, scientists say, weeks after the robot's first attempt resulted in an empty sample tube.

[...] Now the rover, a science lab on wheels that landed on Mars in February, will drive to a new location called Citadelle for a second shot at picking up its first rock sample. This time, to make sure a sample is actually collected, engineers will wait for images of the sample tube to come back before it gets processed and stowed inside the rover’s belly.

“We were just super excited that the hardware worked from beginning to end without any faults. And then there was that surprise — ‘No sample? What do you mean no sample?’,” Louise Jandura, the Chief Engineer for Sampling & Caching on NASA’s Perseverance team, says of the first attempt on August 5th. “So quickly, after that sunk in, we started to do the investigation.”

The rock that Perseverance’s sampling drill bit dug into wasn’t as sturdy as scientists thought it’d be. What was supposed to be a fairly solid rock core turned out to be a crumbly powder that slipped out of the rover’s sampling tube. After finding the sample tube was empty, mission staff used the rover’s cameras to analyze remnants of the hole that Perseverance drilled. They figured the mound of dust around the hole and some material at the bottom of the hole were what slipped out.

“The rock simply wasn’t our kind of rock,” Jennifer Trosper, Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Although we had successfully acquired over 100 cores in a range of different test rocks on Earth, we had not encountered a rock in our test suite that behaved in quite this manner.”


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @09:30PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @09:30PM (#1165590)

    Never mind my pet peeve that a block quote completely does away with the need for the addition of "[sic]", so it should never be used in a block quote, unless it was actually in the material being quoted, but I have to ask, what is wrong with that sentence ("The rock properties might be different than[sic] we expected,") that warrants the "[sic]"? It's location seems to imply the article submitter and/or editor was not happy with the word "than." Please enlighten me, oh wise and wonderful submitter, what was it that rankled your sores?

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Tork on Tuesday August 10 2021, @09:41PM (1 child)

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 10 2021, @09:41PM (#1165593)
      That's really fascinating. What's your take on Apple Jacks not tasting like apples?
      --
      🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
      • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @03:25AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @03:25AM (#1165649)

        They taste [sic].

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @09:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @09:52PM (#1165600)

      Can you explain the multiple instances of [sic][sic][sic][sic] in your post? They don't even seem to be used correctly! And why are you curious about someone's skin sores? Gross.

    • (Score: 2, Redundant) by aristarchus on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:23PM

      by aristarchus (2645) on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:23PM (#1165603) Journal

      Point taken. Was worried it was my submission! But probably a hegemonic Britishism. Brits tend to say "different to" instead of the proper English "different than". In both cases a comparative, I guess, British English has become a polymorphously perverse language, compared to (or different than) American or Auzzie English.

          Or it is an internet raised cunning linguist where "than" has been replaced in all cases by "then", because kids these days kant speil.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:57PM (#1165610)

      Hey, Mister. My retarded little brother wants to pet your pet peeve. It doesn't bite, does it? What do you feed him?

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday August 11 2021, @07:21AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday August 11 2021, @07:21AM (#1165692) Homepage
      "different than" is non-standard. Or as we snobs like to call it, wrong.

      And "[sic]" should *only* be used in quoted material. It's hard for you to be more wrong.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @08:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @08:15AM (#1165700)

      ("The rock properties might be different than[sic] we expected,") that warrants the "[sic]"?

      Lack of grammar understanding by the grammar nazi. It is 100% correct grammar.

      https://www.grammarerrors.com/grammar/different-from-than/ [grammarerrors.com]

      General Guideline:

              If a noun follows different, use from:
              Curiosity is different from other ways of being fulfilled…

              If a clause (has a subject and verb) follows different, use than:
              College life is different than I expected.

      If the [sic] is suppose to indicate *from*, the sentence would have to be,

      "The rock properties might be different from what we expected". And that's still bad English, but oh well.. "The rock properties may be different from expectations".

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:31PM (2 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:31PM (#1165605) Journal

    When you drill a core sample, that sample doesn't just fall out of the hole. You've drilled a 360 degree hole around the sample, but it's still attached at the bottom. You've got to wiggle it, or pry it with a screwdriver, sometimes you have to smack it a glancing blow with a hammer.

    How sure are they that the sample isn't still stuck in the hole they drilled?

    OK - this pic says the sample came out of the hole. That leaves three possibilities. The sample is stuck inside of the drill bit - or the Martians took it away from Perseverance. Unless the sample was simply dropped, and Perseverance ran it over.

    https://vnexplorer.net/nasa-cant-find-the-mars-rock-sample-that-the-perseverance-rover-drilled-it-mysteriously-disappeared-2-er2021436643.html#gallery-2 [vnexplorer.net]
    https://vnexplorer.net/nasa-cant-find-the-mars-rock-sample-that-the-perseverance-rover-drilled-it-mysteriously-disappeared-2-er2021436643.html#gallery-1 [vnexplorer.net]

    https://vnexplorer.net/nasa-cant-find-the-mars-rock-sample-that-the-perseverance-rover-drilled-it-mysteriously-disappeared-2-er2021436643.html [vnexplorer.net]

    --
    “I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @12:34AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @12:34AM (#1165630)

      The collection tube sits inside the drill bit, so if the sample was inside the bit it would be in the tube. That leaves dropping it or the sample either being crushed to powder and mashed into the surrounding material during drilling or simply driven down and buried at the bottom of the hole. The comments about the rock not reacting as expected and the ring of raised material suggest some combination of the latter two. Very annoying, but Mars wouldn't be Mars if it wasn't.

    • (Score: 2, Redundant) by Eratosthenes on Wednesday August 11 2021, @01:48AM

      by Eratosthenes (13959) on Wednesday August 11 2021, @01:48AM (#1165642) Journal

      Looks like they forgot to equip Perseverance with a screwdriver, or a glancing blow hammer. Maybe they need to hire a skilled coring consultant.

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:41PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 10 2021, @10:41PM (#1165608)

    Where's that spunky helicopter when you need it?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @04:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 11 2021, @04:27AM (#1165674)

      That was last week's expensive toy. This week it's Moon rocks. Stay tuned for LIFE on Mars.

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