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Mars NASA

NASA's Mars Rover Fails to Collect Its First Sample (nasa.gov) 82

Posted by EditorDavid from the empty-tubes dept.
Friday the Perseverance rover on Mars made its first attempt to collect a rock sample and seal it in a tube, reports NASA. But unfortunately, the data "indicate that no rock was collected during the initial sampling activity..."

"The sampling process is autonomous from beginning to end," said Jessica Samuels, the surface mission manager for Perseverance at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "One of the steps that occurs after placing a probe into the collection tube is to measure the volume of the sample. The probe did not encounter the expected resistance that would be there if a sample were inside the tube."

The Perseverance mission is assembling a response team to analyze the data. One early step will be to use the WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering) imager - located at the end of the robotic arm - to take close-up pictures of the borehole. Once the team has a better understanding of what happened, it will be able to ascertain when to schedule the next sample collection attempt. "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 JPL
"Mars keeps surprising us," adds the rover's Twitter feed. "We're working through this new challenge. More to come."

Space.com points out this wasn't a make-or-break moment for the rover, since it's still carrying 42 more sampling tubes. And the plan has always been to leave the sample tubes on the surface of Mars, where they'll be retrieved later by future Mars missions.
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NASA's Mars Rover Fails to Collect Its First Sample More

NASA's Mars Rover Fails to Collect Its First Sample

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  • Humans (Score:2, Interesting)

    by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 )
    Yep, this is the part where humans on the ground, while incurring outrageous upfront costs, would ultimately save massive amounts of money. This would be a several-second fix for a geologist on site (not to mention shortening the timeline from years to days). If it turns out that these samples can't be collected at all, it's two billions down the drain.
    • If someone thought that something was on mars that would make them extremely rich and famous to return that item to Earth, human missions would have already come to pass.
    • Yep. Theres not much argument to be made here. You just need 1-way volunteers on this mission. Bring enough tech to set up shop and sustain a small crew. Live off the environment and do as many samples and experiments as you can. You can even payload deposits of new tools, equipment, and tech to do new samples. There are definitely enough humans on this planet suited for this solidarity lifestyle.
      • "solidarity"?

        Or "solitary"? Which it isn't - by definition, since you're talking about a "small crew". Bloody AutoIncorrect.

        A one-way mission doesn't upset me - as long as you got something useful out of it. Which I very much doubt you'd only be able to do with humans. What we know from the geological and palaeontological history of Earth is that it took about 2.5 billion years to get to the stage of forming stromatolite structures ... which is just about possible in the late Noachian period of Martian hi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by e3m4n ( 947977 )
          I would consider it solitary lifestyle because the likelihood that your work and field work would be very human limited. Lets say it was a crew of 20 living in some sort of dome. The person doing hydroponics might, maybe, have one other person trained on that. That means their work life probably consists of being by themselves, talking to plants, and filing reports. Your geologists might go out in pairs, or they might not. Pairs would be safer. So even if half your crew were the scientists doing the experim
          • Shrug. I've spent well over a decade of my life (that's actual clock time, spread over 30 years of working time, in very much the working conditions you describe - the crew of a vessel, classed by job purpose, in the necessary numbers (so day- and night- shift electricians, day and night shift "motor men", 24/7 geologist [me]], 6 able seamen ...) working one or two month rotations, and no attention paid to whether or not people come from the same country, or speak the same language (beyond a functional Engl
            • So youre saying if you werent 50, you would be a prime candidate. Knowing its a 1-way trip might shorten the selection pool a bit. As you said, 10yrs spread over 30, implies some sort of rotation. Mars would be permanent. I was also in the navy, and as bad as 6-9mo deployments were (crews of 150, 500, and 5000 in my case), I always knew we were eventually heading home. So factoring in no return trip 1% might not be a far off number from your 40% when there was a light at the end of a tunnel. Its definitely
              • Choosing from a pool of 1% would probably work. Sacrifice a dozen or several people for ... what? As a Naval person, you probably had some belief about what you were (potentially) selling your life for.

                IF sending humans would do a significantly better job than sending robots, you might get my card in the selection hat. But I don't think it would do.

                It's not as if life on Mars is ever going to be anything other than living in sealed environments and space suits, eating from a hydroponics farm. If you want

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by e3m4n ( 947977 )
                  I can think of quite a few that would jump at the chance of being early pioneers living on mars. Where I live, at one time, Daniel Boone was a local legend. The real story of his life does not sound quite as glorious. He made multiple expeditions trying to find a way through the Appalachian mountain chain. On each expedition he took his family along. Quite a few ended up getting tortured and killed. The point being that some people are hard wired to be explorers and pioneers, regardless the cost. Its in th

                  • The point being that some people are hard wired to be explorers and pioneers, regardless the cost. Its in their DNA.

                    That's going to be a problem for people inheriting those genes.

                    On each expedition he took his family along.

                    Yeah, try getting that past the Ethics Review Committee and then the Health and Safety Review. It's a different world now. And unless you like half of people dieing before they are 10, a better world. To mis-quote the (popular) national anthem, "Those days are past now, and in the past,

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
                      robert zubrin has suggested to avoid issues of microgravity in transit to mars, that the crew module of the vehicle be tethered and swung like a pendulum to create the artificial gravity. So, assuming that works, the the effects of having to re-acclimate to 1/3g would be mitigated by slowly transitioning from 1g to 1/3g during the trip. By the time you arrived, you would have acclimated, again this is all theory.

                      as far as the Apollo 1 reference, that was 100% oxygen at 5psia. That still puts the molarity
                    • Pre-breathing was an issue that the early cave divers had to deal with too - when they were using ex-WD rebreather sets. The problem is that nitrogen exsolving from the "fast" tissues in the diver can dilute the gas "in the bag" (counter-lung) reducing oxygen availability to the diver. Of course, that means that your "sherpa" team would need to lug in at least one additional oxygen bottle per diver (otherwise, you lose dive duration). These decades, when we've got reasonably reliable PPO2 sensors and comput
                    • I read that paper. Sorry, I was hanging onto the wrong end of the stick - I was thinking of the diving environment (obviously) where your suit pressure matches your environmental pressure, but I was forgetting that in space, your suit pressure exceeds your environmental pressure. In a diving "dry" suit, that excess pressure (gas) should bubble out of the wrist, neck and mask seals, but doesn't always ; you drill for venting pressure and manipulating displaced gas as part of drysuit training, because it has

                    • as far as the Apollo 1 reference, that was 100% oxygen at 5psia

                      How was it at 5 psia when Apollos launched at atmospheric pressure and only during ascent depressurized to 5 psia?

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
                      Apollo 1 was the only one that was going to use the 5psia 100% mixture to save on cockpit weight. They had success doing this with the Mercury rockets. However, as you may know, it never made it off the launchpad. They then switched to a 2 gas system to avoid future catastrophes. Thus you cannot project behavior of the subsequent Apollo missions onto Apollo 1 since the design change called for other requirements as well.
                    • I don't get it. Apollo *always* used 5psia 100% mixture in space. So surely that can't be what you're talking about?

                      you cannot project behavior of the subsequent Apollo missions onto Apollo 1

                      I'm not doing any such thing. I'm simply saying that Apollo 1 couldn't have been "100% oxygen at 5psia" since it never left the ground so it couldn't depressurize from 100 kpa, with no reference to any subsequent missions.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by e3m4n ( 947977 )
                      https://www.discovermagazine.c... [discovermagazine.com]

                    • To mimic the pressure differential of 5psi inside the cabin against the vacuum of space, the spacecraft had to be pressurized with 16psi at sea level. That played a big part in the Apollo 1 fire.

                      Yep, that's the thing that was referring to. There weren't 5 psia in the cabin during the test.

    • That's a great idea except for the part where we're not actually capable of sending people to Mars.

      • You mean today. There's a very decent chance that we'll be able to send people before the end of this decade, or at the beginning of the next one.

        • You mean today.

          Ahh, thank you. I knew you'd nitpick that, so yes I totally agree that we can't send them today, which means we also couldn't send them back on Jul 30, 2020, the NASA Rover's launch date.

          So maybe, just maybe that's why they didn't send a human crew.

          If you'd like to add time travel into your argument, have at it.

          • These missions get planned ten years ahead. There's no way to predict the options that will exist when they eventually get launched. Hell, the basic design of this rover is from mid-2000s or so.

            • Right right, so tell me again why they didn't just send humans to Mars in 2020? I mean, it's so easy...

              • Well, to a large extent because someone thought ten years ago that wasting dozens of billions of dollars on the SLS was a good use of funds.
              • BTW, you wouldn't have to alternatively send humans to Mars in 2020 - after 2026 would be sufficient [nasa.gov]. Around 2030 is when you'd get first results from those samples on Earth if the rover missions continue as planned. So asking for a launch of people in 2020 would basically mean getting the results from the samples around eight years in advance compared to the rover.
                • You did not even answer his question. The answer is that it was not possible as the technology does not yet exist today much less launching it years ago for a 2020 landing.
                  • I didn't answer the question because it is a nonsensical question to ask. If one were asking in 2010 (basically when the new Martian efforts started) how to get Martian samples to Earth by early 2030s, the next question would not be how to send humans to Mars in 2020. The question would be how to send them by 2028-ish.
                    • No. You are desperately trying to avoid admitting that your proposed solution to a current problem does not exist. It did not exist years ago; it does not exist now.

      • What rock have you been living under? Hollywood already sent dozens of people to Mars!

    • Two billions for space exploration compared to how much for the U.S. army (land, air and sea combined)?

      • It should be noted that development of a lunar lander for Artemis (assuming the assorted lawsuits against NASA are successful) is going to run the price of the lunar lander into the 5+ billion dollar range.

        Which means that an astronaut delivered to Mars is more likely to cost $50B than $2M....

        Mind you, if Starship ends up being the lander of choice for Luna, it'll probably work just fine as a lander for Mars. It'll still cost rather more than $2M per astronaut delivered to a base on Mars.

  • The sample ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday August 07, 2021 @12:46PM (#61667115)

    ... crawled back out of the tube before the probe could detect it.

  • Keep trying (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday August 07, 2021 @12:50PM (#61667125)

    They don't call it Perseverance for nuthin'.

  • ... with another sample jar, and tell it not to come back until the jar is full. Sheesh.

  • [insert "You had one job!" meme here]

  • Wait until after repeated failed attempts before sending to JPL ... :-)

    "I traveled 54.6M km to Mars and all I got was this empty collection tube."

  • In the end, this is the kind of failure that argues for sending humans to Mars. A simple failure like this will occupy uncountable people at NASA for weeks. On site, a person would likely solve it in a few minutes.

    With new technologies, like Starship, there is actually hope that a manned Mars mission will happen in the next 10-15 years. Stage a pile of supplies, send it on ahead, and send the people after. NASA ate the dream, but private enterprise has re-awakened it. Turns out that some billionaires actu

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