Apparently one of the samples of rock from the planet that the robot had taken it has disappeared. But what is it what exactly happened?
The tube where the sample should be was empty
Perseverance had pierced the planet’s surface and had originally taken a rock sample that had automatically stored in a tube. However, later the team realized that the tube where this sample should be was located empty.
This was very surprising since everyone the procedures what did the robot do to get the sample they were made to perfection, so it was unintelligible that the rock was not in its place.
In addition, the data from other similar tests that were carried out and they found no anomaly compared to other tests that were successful.
That is why the researchers began to think about possible causes of this event. For example, they considered the possibility that the rock simply fell to the ground instead of the tube, because, in addition, the tube was clean and without traces of dust or some similar substance inside.
Everything seems to indicate that it turned to dust
However, it seems that the theory that gains the most force is that the rock disintegrated during the process collection. It would make sense since, with the photographs obtained by the robot itself, it is seen that in the crater where it made the drilling there is no sample, so it is likely that the rock has become more dust during the extraction.
Therefore, everything indicates that the rock that the robot collected was not hard enough and during the process it was It ended up turning to dust.
Faced with this event, which is expected not to be repeated, the researchers want to send to a different area to Perseverance to collect samples. This place is about a sediment from an ancient lake, so the rocks in this area should have greater resistance.
The team hopes that this will not happen again. This robot is expected collect lots of rock samples from Mars and in addition to different typologies, in order to get as much information as possible of these samples.