NASA’s Mars Rover Perseverance Has Pebble-Size Problem That’s Obstructed Rock Sample Collection

NASA’s Perseverance Mars probe is in the process of collecting rock samples to send back to Earth via a future human mission to Mars. But some pebble-sized debris is creating problems for the machine. At first, everything went well. Perseverance has successfully extracted a sample from a rock on Mars, named Issole. However, while transferring the sample to its storage, the driver’s sensor indicated an anomaly – a higher level of resistance. Immediately, the rover stopped coring and called its monitoring system on Earth, asking for further instructions. The incident took place on December 29.

The Persistence The team looked for more data to understand the nature of the anomaly. A week later, they found some pebble-sized debris that interfered with the smooth operation of the probe’s robotic arm.

Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a blog post that the team believes these fragments fell out of storage while collecting rock samples.

NASA engineers are currently trying to remove the debris in an orderly manner. Since this is the first time they’ve done the debris removal, they want to take whatever time it takes to get it done. And they will evaluate the latest dataset at the end of the week.

“This is not the first curve Mars threw at us – the latest,” said Jandura.