The Perseverance vehicle, which landed on Mars in a crater called Lake in February, has several tasks: to look for traces of ancient life, to prove that the crater was a really huge, deep lake in the distant past – and to collect rock samples that other probes would transport to Earth. The last task is a fantastic premiere; it would be the first time that rock samples from another planet could be brought from space. However, the first step of this mission failed at the beginning of August, and now information is beginning to emerge as to why this probably happened.
The rock samples that the Perseverance crater drills and collects during research are to be in the form of thin rollers housed in titanium housings the size of a fountain pen. At first, everything seemed to be going well. Data sent to the mission control center on August 6, the day of the first sampling attempt, shows that the drilling rig at the end of the 2.1-meter-long robotic arm was working as it should, drilling seven inches into the Martian rocks. Additional data indicate that even the titanium shell did not jam or fail inside the probe. When all this data arrived at headquarters, there was enthusiasm. Unfortunately, but prematurely.
Another set of data from the probe revealed a few hours later that the titanium shell remained empty, there was no rock sample in it. Did the probe drill a cavity? Hardly, the photographs show a drilled empty hole surrounded by rock, evidently a hole after a drill core taken from a continuous material (by the way, this is the first similar well in space). “Mars continues to surprise us. We are trying to unravel this new mystery, “the mission’s management team announced on Twitter, adding that he had not encountered anything similar during the tests on Earth.
Perhaps the material had an unexpected consistency, crumbled to dust, and spilled out of its case. No clues could be found on the spot, but this is the most likely explanation. “The rock didn’t seem to be cohesive enough to form a drill core,” she told CNN news in the direction of Louise Jandur, head of sampling.
With the help of a drone
The plan for the entire project to transport Martian rocks to Earth is for the probe to leave the sample titanium shells scattered in the Lake crater or keep them with it. Sometime towards the end of this decade, another expedition starts, samples another rover, this time developed in Europe, and passes them to a NASA-made launch case, which transports them to the orbit of Mars. Thus begins their transportation to Earth.
Perseverance carries a total of 43 cases and the goal of the mission is to fill samples of at least 20 of them, so there is plenty of time and attempts to correct the first failure. The probe is now heading to an area where sediments are similar to those in which sampling was tested on Earth, and the Ingenuity helicopter (again, the first drone in space) will help it find a suitable place for another experiment. It is scheduled for early September.
It is still true that if the whole project can endanger something, then it is on Earth, not on Mars. The cost of transporting the samples to the Utah desert, where they plan to land hard in 2031, is estimated at more than $ 7 billion, well above the cost of the Perseverance mission alone ($ 2.7 billion). And the development of none of the probes to bring samples has even begun. The first failure does not mean any disaster, but if the project was accompanied by further difficulties, the return mission could be canceled. The Mars rocks would then probably be studied directly on the fourth planet by the first astronauts.
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