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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: 1) by dcollins55 on Saturday August 21 2021, @08:29PM (3 children)

    by dcollins55 (15202) on Saturday August 21 2021, @08:29PM (#1169393)

    The engineer and a PM have nothing to do with each other. If you're seeing a conspiracy because in a team of 100+ there are two women, there is something mentally wrong with you.

    As far as your Nannygate - yes, that article is talking about several women, nominated for completely different positions. Out of hundreds of positions Clinton filled with both men and women.

    If you take a mixed pool, pick only the women from that pool, then scream "something is wrong here, there are only women in this pool" - you are correct. Something is very wrong. You should get an MRI to find out what. Maybe they have pills that will help you stop being a "niceguy" one day.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday August 22 2021, @05:35PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Sunday August 22 2021, @05:35PM (#1169636) Homepage
    But he didn't pick only women. He picked every single named individual in the summary, there was no sampling bias from him. In fact, that's not even a sample - that's the population.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 1) by dcollins55 on Sunday August 22 2021, @08:28PM (1 child)

      by dcollins55 (15202) on Sunday August 22 2021, @08:28PM (#1169676)

      When you write a paragraph completely agreeing with someone, you usually wouldn't start that paragraph with "But". Your English is very good, but a little unpolished. But practice makes perfect.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 23 2021, @04:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 23 2021, @04:18PM (#1169896)

        But he was disagreeing, not agreeing. Also don't forget this is the English language we're talking about. There are no rules. That is why Strunk and White wrote "The Elements of Style" and not "The Rules of English Grammar."