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The Mars rover Perseverance has pebbles stuck in its drill. NASA has a plan to fix it. - Space.com

The Mars rover Perseverance has pebbles stuck in its drill. NASA has a plan to fix it. - Space.com

The Mars rover Perseverance has pebbles stuck in its drill. NASA has a plan to fix it. - Space.com
Jan 19, 2022 1 min, 11 secs

NASA's Perseverance rover will dump its latest Mars sample to unclog pebbles from its drill. .

Perseverance mission managers made the unexpected announcement that they had to dump out Percy's latest sample via a blog post on Friday (Jan. 14).

"Simply put, we are returning the remaining contents of Sample Tube 261, our latest cored-rock sample, back to its planet of origin.".

Related: Where to find the latest Mars photos from NASA's Perseverance rover.

Pre-launch rover testing on Earth revealed that evacuating the drill's collection tube is fairly easy to do, she reported, although this hasn't been tested yet on windy, dusty Mars where the gravity is a quarter that of our own planet's. .

— In photos: NASA's Mars Perseverance rover on the Red Planet!

— Perseverance rover confirms existence of ancient Mars lake and river delta.

"We sent commands up yesterday, and later on today the rover’s robotic arm will simply point the open end of the sample tube toward the surface of Mars and let gravity do the rest," Trosper said, meaning the procedure was likely finished over this past weekend.

The commands will ask the rover to do rotation tests of its bit carousel to assess pebble movement, and more information will come from new pictures taken underneath Perseverance to see if more "pebbles happen to pop free," she said.

Perseverance is caching samples like this one for a planned sample-return mission to pick up.

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