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Science

Pesky pebbles are clogging NASA Perseverance Mars rover’s rock sample system

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This image from Jan. 7 shows the debris obstructing the bit carousel on NASA’s Perseverance rover.


NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

This story is part of Welcome to Mars, our series exploring the red planet.

Mars doesn’t take kindly to our robotic explorers. It chokes them with dust, roughs up their wheels and messes with their probes, and now it’s throwing a new challenge at NASA’s Perseverance rover. Pebble-size debris is blocking the machine’s rock sample collection system.

Everything went smoothly at first. On Dec. 29, Perseverance drilled into a rock nicknamed Issole and extracted a sample of it. “However, during the transfer of the bit that contains the sample into the rover’s bit carousel (which stores bits and passes tubes to the tube processing hardware inside the rover), our sensors indicated an anomaly,” wrote Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching, in a blog post on Friday.

The rover halted its sampling activities when it met unusual resistance during the process of stowing the sample. As the rover team expressed in a tweet on Friday, the upshot is the debris is preventing the rover’s robotic arm from properly handing off the sample-filled tube for sealing and storage. 

Perseverance is the first rover to attempt to collect samples of Mars in sealed tubes. It’s a key part of a mission that’s also seeking out signs of ancient microbial life on the red planet. NASA is planning to send an ambitious future mission to pick up the samples and bring them back to Earth for study. 

The rover team commanded the machine to backtrack by pulling out the drill bit and tube. It snapped some images along the way to help diagnose the problem. “These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris,” Jandura wrote. NASA expects the pebbles fell out of the sample tube.

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While the debris presents a challenge, there’s no reason to fret yet. Jandura said the designers of the bit carousel have considered this possibility, but that it will take time to work through a solution that allows the pebbles to “exit in a controlled and orderly fashion.”

NASA has proven resourceful when it comes to working through the red planet’s temper tantrums. The Perseverance team plans to take this one slow to ensure the sampling system is clear and ready to go for future work. 



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Science

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Runs Into a Snag While Collecting Samples on Mars

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On September 1, NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully completed its first sample-taking operation 190 days into its mission on Mars. It was an exciting time for all, especially the space agency. Things aren’t looking as bright now though.

NASA has reported that the rover has encountered a problem with its rock collecting system which has forced the whole mission to take a few steps back. “This is only the 6th time in human history a sample has been cored from a rock on a planet other than Earth, so when we see something anomalous going on, we take it slow,” wrote Louise Jandura, Chief Engineer for Sampling and Caching at NASA/JPL in a blog.

Here is what happened

On December 29th, space debris partially blocked the rover’s bit carousel, the part of Perseverance that passes sample tubes for internal processing. NASA then had to wait until January 6th to send a command to take images to assess what happened and what needed to be done to fix the issue.

Once it had all the appropriate information, NASA sent up a command to extract the drill bit and sample-filled tube from the bit carousel and undock the robotic arm from the bit carousel. The space agency then took more images to determine what exactly was blocking the carousel.

“These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris. The team is confident that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube at the time of Coring Bit Dropoff, and that they prevented the bit from seating completely in the bit carousel,” wrote Jandura.

Well, there you have it, folks. It was just a small amount of pebbles but it managed to knock Perseverance out of operations for a few days. Luckily all is well that ends well and the rover can continue its rock-collecting mission.



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World

UK: Con woman stole diamonds by swapping them for pebbles

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A British court has heard how a woman allegedly pretended to be a gem expert and swapped diamonds worth 4.2 million pounds ($5.7 million) for pebbles using “sleight of hand” at a luxury London jewelers.

Prosecutors said Tuesday that Lulu Lakatos, 60, posed as a gem expert and went to jewelry shop Boodles in London’s tony Mayfair area in March 2016, allegedly to value seven diamonds on behalf of a group of wealthy Russian buyers.

The diamonds, which included a 20-carat heart-shaped diamond valued at more than 2.2 million pounds,- were to be placed in a locked bag and held in the jeweler’s vault until payment was transferred. But when Boodles’ own diamond expert became suspicious and opened the bag the next day, she found seven small pebbles.

Prosecutor Philip Stott said the diamonds had been “stolen by the defendant by sleight of hand.”

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“The conspiracy in which she is alleged to have played an integral and central part was one of the highest possible sophistication, planning, risk and reward,” he told Southwark Crown Court in London.

Lakatos, who was born in Romania but lived in France, denies any wrongdoing. She is charged with conspiracy to steal.

Nicholas Wainwright, chairman of Boodles, one of Britain’s top luxury jewelry brands, said in a statement that he had been approached by an Israeli buyer who wanted to invest in high-value diamonds in the weeks before the theft. He agreed to the sale of the seven diamonds following a meeting in a Monaco hotel.

Wainwright met with Lakatos in his shop’s basement, along with his own diamond expert Emma Barton. As soon as Wainwright left the room to take a call from the alleged buyer, Lakatos put the padlocked purse containing the gems in her own handbag, Barton told the jury.

Barton said she protested, but Stott alleged that Lakatos swapped the purse with an identical locked bag and placed that back on the table in a matter of seconds.

Prosecutors said Lakatos then worked with accomplices to make their getaway to France in a rented car.

Two men have already pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal over the heist.

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Barton said she discovered “seven garden pebbles” when she opened the purse the next evening.

Lakatos was arrested in France on a European arrest warrant last September and extradited to the U.K.

The trial is expected to last several more days.

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