The first borehole drilled by NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars
Perseverance Mars rover's first rock sample goes missing. Engineers are trying to work out what went wrong when the US space agency's Perseverance rover tried to gather its first rock core on Mars.
The robot's mechanisms seemed to work perfectly but when a metal tube expected to hold the sample was examined, it was found to be empty.
The mission team thinks the particular properties of the target rock may have been to blame.
More images and telemetry pulled down from Mars should solve the puzzle.
"The initial thinking is that the empty tube is more likely a result of the rock target not reacting the way we expected during coring, and less likely a hardware issue with the sampling and caching system," said Jennifer Trosper, project manager for Perseverance at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.