Our first success: The upper two pebbles were ejected from the bit carousel during a test.

This is great news, as these small chunks of debris are believed to be the cause of the unsuccessful transfer of the drill bit and sample tube into the carousel back on Dec.

Rotating Perseverance's Bit Carousel: An annotated GIF depicts a rotational test of Perseverance’s bit carousel in which two of four rock fragments were ejected.

17, the WATSON camera imaged the bit carousel and its pebbles – and also took images underneath the rover to establish just what was down there before any recovery strategies were applied.

Tuesday night we also received the second set of under-rover images, which show two new pebbles on the surface, indicating the ejected pebbles made it fully through bit carousel and back onto the surface of Mars as planned.

Perseverance Expels Rock Fragments: A portion of a cored-rock sample is ejected from the rotary percussive drill on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover.

The imagery from the experiment shows a small amount of sample material falling out of the drill bit/sample tube.

Perseverance's Sample Tube Looks Clean: This image, taken by the Mastcam-Z camera aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover on Jan.

20, 2022, shows the rover successfully expelled the remaining large fragments of cored rock from a sample tube held in its drill.