You know when you buy a new sneaker, you start to feel uncomfortable when you walk and, when you look, you realize that a pebble got stuck in the sole? For the probe Perseverance, from Nasa, which is on mission in Mars, has a similar problem.
Specialists from the American space agency have been working since late December to find a way to remove some debris stuck to the robot that was identified during the extraction of a sample on the red planet.
According to NASA, during the transfer of the bit that contained the sample to the rover’s bit carousel (which does the processing and sends the data to the agency), the sensors indicated the anomaly.
The problem occurred during the so-called “Coring Bit Dropoff”, which is when the drill, with its tube containing the The freshly collected sample is guided out of the percussive drill (at the end of the robotic arm) and onto the drill carousel (located on the robot chassis). At this moment, the sensor registered a resistance greater than expected during the operation.
Strategy to remove the fragment
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Since last week, NASA has been studying in detail images of the ground through which Perseverance passes to, initially, understand the types of rock per wave the probe will transit and observe the possibility of some more fragments joining the carousel of bits in the future.
Now, NASA has decided to simply rotate the carousel of bits using Perseverance’s robotic arm so that the compartment drops the pebbles. And how will the space agency know if this move worked? Simple: just look at the ground again and see if there are any additional fragments in place.
“The team at Perseverance is exploring all facets of the problem to ensure that we don’t just get rid of these rock debris, but also avoid a similar recurrence during future sampling. Essentially, we are leaving no stone unturned,” wrote Jennifer Trosper, Project Manager for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, on the agency’s official blog.
If the procedure is successful, Perseverance will resume the exploration in the rock that ended up causing the problem. “If our plans work out with our pebble mitigation, we might as well try to extract the core of ‘issole’ (the rock this sample was taken from) again,” Trosper said.
Despite the problem, the Perseverance rover is able to continue working on the surface of the planet. However, as the machine is still relatively new on Mars, the agency wants to treat the components as best as possible to avoid future problems.
This was not the first anomaly found by NASA during the mission. The first attempt to collect soil samples came empty, which led the American space agency to test alternative methods to start collecting rocks.
According to NASA, the robot is equipped with 43 sample tubes, seven of which have been archived so far. It is believed that by the end of the 2020s, these tubes will be sent back to Earth via an ambitious mission called Mars Sample Return.
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