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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.”
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 21 2021, @06:36PM
None of which behaved similar to the martian rock, I would hazard a guess that insufficient humidity has caused insufficient cementation of sediment on mars, leading to this 'rock' actually being more soil-like in consistency. Since they hadn't attempted to sample like this on Mars before, it is entirely possible the wrong tool was sent for the job. Unless they have been onboard since the design of the rover and were directly involved in the terrestrial testing and design, it's unlikely they are in any way at fault. And given how often things succeed at NASA it makes it hard for most to understand that failures are quite common especially in unexplored phenomena (something we have far fewer of today, and many of which have computer models or simulatons to help discover unusual properties before we experiment with them directly. This rock apparently did not.)
While we're on the subject, go read up on women at NASA dating back to the 1950s-60s. Hint: There are a lot of them and if it wasn't for the sexism of the era many could have been in positions of leadership or even landed on the moon.