Perseverance Rover fails to collect Mars rock sample in first attempt: NASA

New Delhi : The Perseverance rover failed to collect a rock sample from Mars in its first attempt, NASA said in its press release.

“Data sent to Earth by NASA’s Perseverance rover after its first attempt to collect a rock sample on Mars and seal it in a sample tube indicate that no rock was collected during the initial sampling activity,” the release said on Friday.

According to the release, NASA has now setup a team to address the problem at earliest.

Talking more about it, NASA said that the rover successfully drilled a hole but failed to collect the sample, which was never the case when it was tested on Earth.

The rover carries 43 titanium sample tubes and is equipped with a hollow coring bit and percussive drill at the end of its 7-foot-long robotic arm to extract samples.

The six-wheel rover had landed on the red planet in February this year. Currently, it has been stationed at one position.

The rover will collect two samples at this site, including a specimen for what NASA called “proximity science.”

The samples will then be sealed and stored for subsequent NASA missions, now in development in with the European Space Agency, that would send spacecraft to Mars to collect the sealed samples and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

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