Mars Perseverance Sol 320 – WATSON Picture: NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this picture utilizing its onboard SHERLOC WATSON imager. The digital camera is situated on the turret on the finish of the rover’s robotic arm. The picture was acquired on Jan. 13, 2022 (Sol 320). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Mars 2020 mission crew has been working methodically and completely, making good progress on understanding the perfect path ahead to take away the uninvited pebbles from Perseverance’s bit carousel. Over the earlier weekend, and earlier this week, operational sequences have been developed and examined to take away these rocky interlopers.
With terrestrial experimentation full, now we have begun executing our mitigation technique on Mars. On January 12 we did an in depth picture survey of the bottom beneath Perseverance. This was completed so we might have a good suggestion what rocks and pebbles exist already down there earlier than some extra – from our bit carousel – be part of them within the not-so-distant future.
With this below-chassis, preliminary imaging, in hand, the crew launched into a maneuver with our robotic arm I by no means imagined we might carry out – ever. Merely put, we're returning the remaining contents of Pattern Tube 261 (our newest cored-rock pattern) again to its planet of origin. Though this state of affairs was by no means designed or deliberate for previous to launch, it seems dumping a core from an open tube is a reasonably easy course of (a minimum of throughout Earth testing). We despatched instructions up yesterday, and in a while at this time the rover’s robotic arm will merely level the open finish of the pattern tube towards the floor of Mars and let gravity do the remainder.
I think about your subsequent query is, “Why are you dumping out the contents of the pattern tube?” The reply is that, at current, we aren't sure how a lot cored rock continues to reside in Tube 261. And whereas this rock won't ever make my vacation card record, the science crew actually appears to love it. So if our plans go nicely with our pebble mitigation (see beneath), we could very nicely try to core “Issole” (the rock from which this pattern was taken) once more.
This brings me to the subsequent steps in our pebble mitigation technique: we’re sending up instructions to the rover later at this time, ordering it to do two rotation assessments of the bit carousel. These assessments (the primary, a small rotation; the second, bigger) will execute this weekend. Our expectations are that these rotations – and any subsequent pebble motion – will assist information our crew, offering them the required info on methods to proceed. Nonetheless, to be thorough, we're additionally commanding the rover to take a second set of under-chassis photographs, simply in case a number of pebbles occur to pop free.
We count on the information and imagery from these two rotation assessments to be despatched to Earth by subsequent Tuesday, Jan. 18. From there, we’ll analyze and additional refine our plans. If I needed to ballpark it, I might estimate we’ll be at our present location one other week or so – or much more if we resolve to re-sample Issole.
So there you've gotten it. The Perseverance crew is exploring each side of the difficulty to make sure that we not solely eliminate this rocky particles but additionally stop an analogous reoccurrence throughout future sampling. Primarily, we're leaving no rock unturned within the pursuit of those 4 pebbles.
Written by Jennifer Trosper, Mission Supervisor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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