A bad news of Perseverance Sample Test | Latest Data from Mars Perseverance Rover
After six months of driving on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover attempted to drill into the Martian surface to take its first sample on 6 August. Everything seemed to go smoothly, but when the rover’s operators checked the sample tube after it had been sealed and stored inside the rover, they found that it was empty.
“It went really well, other than that the rock behaved in a way that didn’t allow us to get any sample in the tube,” says Jennifer Trosper, the Perseverance project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After combing through the data, the mission’s operators suspect that when the rover drilled into the rock to take a sample, it fell apart into a fine powder and sprinkled out of the tube.
“We need a more cooperative type of rock,” says Trosper. “This one was crumbly – it may have had a surface that was hard, but once we got in there all the grains just sort of came apart.” This didn’t happen during tests of the sampling system on Earth, nor has it been a problem with the other Mars rovers.