• Home
  • Science
  • Technology
  • Futurism
  • Weather Extreme

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

What's Hot

Flag Media Launches New Website to Effectively Tie All Business Divisions Together

September 22, 2023

Flag Blockchain Launches Flag Recovery Initiative and the FXR Token

September 22, 2023

Flag Wallet Adds Features and Functionality to Compete with MetaMask

September 19, 2023
Facebook Twitter Instagram
Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube
Futurist JournalFuturist Journal
Demo
  • Home
  • Science
  • Technology
  • Futurism
  • Weather Extreme
Futurist JournalFuturist Journal
Home»Latest Science»NASA’s Perseverance to attempt second Mars soil scoop, hoping rocks don’t ‘crumble’
Latest Science

NASA’s Perseverance to attempt second Mars soil scoop, hoping rocks don’t ‘crumble’

NewsBy NewsAugust 20, 2021Updated:August 20, 2021No Comments4 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Telegram Tumblr Email
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

NASA’s Mars rover, Perseverance, is getting ready for another attempt, in the coming weeks, to scoop up Martian rocks after its first attempt earlier this month didn’t play out as engineers expected. The rover’s sample-caching arm worked, engineers say, but the sampling tube turned up empty.

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.

‘No sample? What do you mean no sample?’

“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.






  • A closeup image of the borehole drilled by Perseverance, showing a mound of dusty material that scientists suspect slipped out of the rover’s drill bit tube.


    NASA/JPL-Caltech




  • The hole Perseverance drilled on August 5th sitting to the right of the shadow of the rover’s turret.


    NASA/JPL-Caltech


“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.”

Perseverance’s seven-foot, five-jointed sampling arm reaches out from the front of the rover toward a rock of interest with a large shoe box-sized head, or turret, on the end that weighs 100 pounds. That head packs a hollow drill bit, formally called a Rotary Percussive Corer Drill, that drills into the rock and traps material inside a tube, which gets stowed back into the rover and processed inside another tube until it’s ready to get left somewhere on the Martian surface.

The drill bit used for Perseverance’s first sampling attempt is for collecting rock cores. Some of the rover’s 9 drill bits are better suited for collecting regolith — the more crumbly, dirt-like material that engineers accidentally encountered during the first sampling attempt.


Perseverance’s mission to collect up to 35 samples of Martian rocks is the first leg of a three-pronged endeavor to return those samples back to Earth sometime in the 2030s. The rocks, stowed inside tiny chalk-sized sample tubes, would represent the first pristine Mars samplings ever captured and returned to Earth by humans. Perseverance will leave the tubes somewhere on the Martian surface for a future NASA robot to collect and launch into Mars’ orbit, where another spacecraft built by the European Space Agency will catch and carry it the rest of the way home.

NASA engineers spent nearly a decade designing and building the rover’s sampling system, which Perseverance’s chief engineer Adam Steltzner has described as “the most complicated, most sophisticated thing that we know how to build.”

Source

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
News
  • Website

Related Posts

Scientists Revive 46,000-Year-Old Worm That Was Frozen In Siberian Permafrost

July 30, 2023

There is a ‘Gravity Hole’ in the Indian Ocean. Scientists Now Think They Know Why

July 26, 2023

Century-Old Paradigm Overturned – Brain Shape Matters More Than Neural Connectivity

July 22, 2023

How fish evolved their bony, scaly armor

July 17, 2023

James Webb Telescope catches glimpse of possi

July 14, 2023

Utah’s Famously White Snow Is Getting Dusty

July 10, 2023

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent Posts
  • Flag Media Launches New Website to Effectively Tie All Business Divisions Together
  • Flag Blockchain Launches Flag Recovery Initiative and the FXR Token
  • Flag Wallet Adds Features and Functionality to Compete with MetaMask
  • Flag Blockchain Sets a New Standard by Forking the Popular Polygon Blockchain
  • Here’s how hot and extreme the summer has been, and it’s only halfway over
Recent Comments
    Demo
    Top Posts

    Flag Media Launches New Website to Effectively Tie All Business Divisions Together

    September 22, 2023

    A Look at the Future of More Sustainable Living and Travel

    June 5, 2021

    Germany’s patriotism paradox

    July 18, 2021
    Don't Miss

    Flag Media Launches New Website to Effectively Tie All Business Divisions Together

    September 22, 2023

    [Frisco, TX] – Flag Media, a dynamic and innovative conglomerate, is proud to announce the…

    Flag Blockchain Launches Flag Recovery Initiative and the FXR Token

    September 22, 2023

    Flag Wallet Adds Features and Functionality to Compete with MetaMask

    September 19, 2023

    Flag Blockchain Sets a New Standard by Forking the Popular Polygon Blockchain

    September 18, 2023
    Stay In Touch
    • Facebook
    • YouTube
    • TikTok
    • WhatsApp
    • Twitter
    • Instagram
    Latest Reviews
    Demo
    Most Popular

    Flag Media Launches New Website to Effectively Tie All Business Divisions Together

    September 22, 2023

    A Look at the Future of More Sustainable Living and Travel

    June 5, 2021

    Germany’s patriotism paradox

    July 18, 2021
    Our Picks

    Flag Media Launches New Website to Effectively Tie All Business Divisions Together

    September 22, 2023

    Flag Blockchain Launches Flag Recovery Initiative and the FXR Token

    September 22, 2023

    Flag Wallet Adds Features and Functionality to Compete with MetaMask

    September 19, 2023
    Editor's Pick

    Engineering shortage in the U.S. frustrates chip industry

    October 23, 2022

    DroneSeed uses swarms of drones to reseed forests after wildfires

    June 28, 2022

    Sonic Frontiers Has Sold 2.5 Million Copies

    December 13, 2022
    Futurist Journal
    Facebook Twitter Instagram Pinterest YouTube Dribbble
    • Contact Us
    • Privacy Policy
    © 2023 futuristjournal.com - All Rights Reserved.

    Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.