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Last week, NASA The Perseverance rover reached a new milestone in search of extraterrestrial life: digging into Mars to pull out a rock stopper, they will eventually be able to return to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists in early August 6 indicated victory: the robot dug into the Red Planet and a photograph also showed a pile of dust around the probe.
“What happened the next morning was a mountain of emotions,” wrote Louise Jandura, chief sampling and caching engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. blog post describing yesterday’s essay. While the data indicated that Perseverance had inserted a sample tube into the stomach for storage, that tube was empty. “It took a few minutes to sink this reality but the team quickly passed on as an investigation,” Jandura wrote. “It’s what we do. It’s the foundation of science and engineering. “
So far, the team has some signs of what went wrong with Katie Stack Morgan, a deputy scientist on the Mars 2020 mission project, in what she calls a “missing core case.”
“We have successfully demonstrated the sample caching process, however, we have a tube with no core,” he says. “How could all these steps be carried out perfectly and successfully, however, there is no rock — and no anything“In the tube?” »
One theory, of course, was that the rover dropped the base sample. But there was no broken part on the surface. Also, Stack Morgan says the tube was “very clean, there was no dust, suggesting nothing that had ever entered the tube.”
NASA scientists now believe that the core was crushed during the drilling process, and then scattered around the hole. “That would explain why we don’t see pieces in the hole and why we don’t see pieces on the ground, because they’ve basically become part of the cut,” says Stack Morgan. “So we started thinking about why that happened, because that’s not the behavior that the engineers saw in a very wide set of rocks before they started.”
The duration is being drilled in the Jezero crater, which cradled a lake, so it may have lived there the life of ancient microbes. (Based on a Mars helicopter, Invention, crawl before drilling spots.) Instead of dust samples on the surface, immersed in the rock, the walker will provide essential clues about the geological history of the planet. The Curiosity walker, which landed on Mars in 2012, was also drilled, but was designed to grind rocks instead of extracting the core. This time, NASA engineers want samples that will allow them to observe the rock as it was laid, so they can study the characteristics of life; some microbes, for example, leave distinctive minerals.
For durability, the drilling process begins inside the rover, in the section called caching fitting assembly. Here, a robotic arm pulls a tube out of storage and inserts it into a “carousel bit,” a container to store all of Perseverance’s nuggets. The carousel is then rotated, presenting a tube of the same shape and size as a laboratory test tube—To a 7 meter long arm that will be drilled. “We get that pain, and that has a tube inside it,” Jessica Samuels, director of the Perseverance surface mission, said in an interview prior to the first drilling attempt. “And now we’re ready to get the sample at that point.”
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