Perseverance Mars rover wind sensor damaged by pebbles, but still operational:
The Perseverance rover touched down on the Red Planet in February 2021 carrying, among other instruments, a weather station dubbed Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA). That instrument includes two wind sensors that measure speed and direction, among several other sensors that provide weather metrics such as humidity, radiation and air temperature.
Pebbles carried aloft by strong Red Planet gusts recently damaged one of the wind sensors, but MEDA can still keep track of wind at its landing area in Jezero Crater, albeit with decreased sensitivity, José Antonio Rodriguez Manfredi, principal investigator of MEDA, told Space.com.
"Right now, the sensor is diminished in its capabilities, but it still provides speed and direction magnitudes," Rodriguez Manfredi, a scientist at the Spanish Astrobiology Center in Madrid, wrote in an e-mail. "The whole team is now re-tuning the retrieval procedure to get more accuracy from the undamaged detector readings."
The two approximately ruler-sized wind sensors on Perseverance are encircled by six individual detectors that aim to give accurate readings from any direction, according to materials from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which manages the rover.
[...] Like all instruments on Perseverance, the wind sensor was designed with redundancy and protection in mind, Rodriguez Manfredi noted. "But of course, there is a limit to everything."
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printed from SoylentNews, Perseverance Mars Rover Wind Sensor Damaged by Pebbles, but Still Operational on 2024-04-18 22:18:26