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This time the rock did not disappear.
After a surprising failure last month, NASA’s latest Mars rover, Perseverance, managed to drill through a rock sample Wednesday. The rover took pictures of the rock in the tube and sent the images back to Earth so mission managers could make sure they didn’t come up empty again. Then Perseverance will close the collection tube and place it on his stomach.
The success, seen in images posted online on Thursday, likely reassures scientists working on the mission.
“You can see a beautiful core of rock,” Kenneth A. Farley, professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology and project scientist for Perseverance, said in an email Thursday morning.
One of the most important tasks for perseverance is collecting rocks and soil that will eventually disappear. brought back to Earth on another mission So scientists can study them extensively, using state-of-the-art devices in their labs, just as they do in their labs. Moon rocks from the Apollo and Soviet missions 1960’s and 70’s.
And yet, on August 6, when Perseverance drilled, collected, and sealed a rock sample for the first time, everything seemed flawless—except that the tube was empty.
Dr. “It was definitely a little bit of despair,” Farley said in an interview before the last drilling attempt. “Everyone was very ready to declare victory. Then someone said, ‘Yes, here’s a picture, nothing in the tube. It was very faint.”
The rover used its cameras to look around and see if the rock core had somehow fallen to the ground. But there was no trace. The rock specimen seemed to have disappeared.
The biggest concern was that Perseverance’s complex piercing mechanism suffered a crippling failure and was unable to collect any specimens. But after examining the data, engineers and scientists concluded that the rock, not the rover, was the culprit.
“Rock wasn’t our kind of rock,” said Jennifer Trosper, the mission’s project manager. NASA wrote in a blog post On August 19, Rover’s systems had performed as expected – “pretty good actually,” Miss Trosper wrote – but the rock was very fragile.
“The coring operation caused the rock to crumble into powder and small pieces of material that were not retained in the tube due to their size,” said Ms. Trosper. Despite numerous tests around the world, he added, “We’ve never encountered a rock in our test suite that behaved this way.”
Farley admits there are warning signs that August rock might not be the best rock to try first. Its brown color showed rust, contained salt, and was full of holes.
Rust, salts and holes meant that the rock had been sitting in a lake or groundwater for too long. This was a potentially great scientific discovery. Mineralogical changes caused by water could have lit up billions of years ago when Mars was wet and habitable.
But a rusty, salty rock full of holes can also be very crumbly. “We learned a lesson,” said Dr. Farley.
The operation was not a complete loss. There is no rock or soil in the tube, but it does contain sealed, uncontaminated Martian air that scientists plan to collect at another time.
Dr. For the second drilling attempt, the rover went up a hill slightly higher than the surrounding terrain at about 400 yards, and “and we chose the hardest-looking rock you could find there,” Farley said. This rock nicknamed Rochette, it has survived through the ages and has not been eroded by the winds, strong evidence that it has not crumbled.
The rock looks like a hardened piece of lava that can be dated with certainty. Thus, scientists will be able to determine how old this rock is, and it will help determine the ages of lower, older layers.
Dr. “This was a high-value target,” Farley said.
Dr. It will take more than a decade for Farley and other scientists to get their hands on it. At some point perseverance will drop hermetically sealed tubes onto the Martian surface to await pickup by a future rover, which is likely still on the drawing board.
This rover will take the rock samples on a small rocket and launch the samples on their return journey to Earth, but they won’t arrive until the 2030s.
Perseverance will continue to explore A 28-mile-wide crater called Jezeroan old, dried-up river delta, especially along its western edge. Accompanying the traveler A small robotic helicopter called Ingenuity Added to the mission to test his ability to fly in the thin air of Mars.
Although NASA planned to outrun Ingenuity after a series of test flights, it has been so successful that the helicopter continues to advance with Perseverance, keeping a watchful eye on the terrain ahead. And it advances the rover’s scientific mission, too.
The scientists had intended to visit a site that looked stunning in images taken from orbit. “Then we looked at the helicopter footage,” said Dr. Farley and less impressed.
“We’re going to save a lot of time by not going there,” he said.
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