Why Perseverance’s first Mars drilling check got here up empty

Why Perseverance’s first Mars drilling test came up empty

Enlarge (credit score: NASA)

Final week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a brand new milestone within the seek for extraterrestrial life: drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which is able to ultimately get fired again to Earth for scientists to review. Knowledge despatched to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robotic had certainly drilled into the pink planet, and a photograph even confirmed a mud pile across the borehole.

“What adopted later within the morning was a rollercoaster of feelings,” wrote Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a weblog publish yesterday describing the try. Whereas information indicated that Perseverance had transferred a pattern tube into its stomach for storage, that tube was in actual fact empty. “It took a couple of minutes for this actuality to sink in, however the group rapidly transitioned to investigation mode,” Jandura wrote. “It’s what we do. It’s the foundation of science and engineering.”

By now, the group has just a few indications of what went improper in what Katie Stack Morgan, deputy venture scientist of the Mars 2020 mission, calls “the case of the lacking core.”

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