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posted by janrinok on Saturday August 21 2021, @04:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the wrong-kind-of-rock dept.

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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday August 21 2021, @06:48PM (4 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 21 2021, @06:48PM (#1169363) Journal

    My question for you would be, "What do you know about those women?" And, your answer would probably be "Almost nothing."

    No, don't bother finding their biographies online. I wanted to know what you know about the women. Were you classmates in college with them? Are you married to them? Did you date them? Do you know their parents and siblings? Are you a sibling? A cousin even? Have you ever even them?

    Unless you can produce evidence that they are actually unqualified for the jobs they have, you are completely irrelevant.

    Have you been recently passed over for a promotion, and some woman got the job instead? Maybe she was actually better qualified than you are. Bummer, dude.

    --
    “I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
    Starting Score:    1  point
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @01:08AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @01:08AM (#1169470)

    Which is exactly the problem with quota-based promotion. People came to "know about those women" (and all other women) that promotion-because-woman is a thing.
    It devalues the actual achievement, like Olympic medals would be devalued if (when?) some of them got distributed according to quotas.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @04:08AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @04:08AM (#1169504)

      Only amoungst beta males, like yourself.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @10:32AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @10:32AM (#1169562)

        Omega proud of its status? How quaint.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @05:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 22 2021, @05:32PM (#1169635)
          Says the highly stable geniouse who doesn't realise it stops at epsilon.