NASA Mars rover's mission interrupted by Elmo's nemesis: A small rock.
Elmo isn't the only one struggling to deal with a small rock in recent days.
On Friday, NASA's Twitter account for the Mars-researching Perseverance rover blasted out some news and a set of photos to go with it: The rover is having trouble stowing away its latest collected sample of the Mars landscape because some rocks are getting in the way.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
"I recently captured my sixth rock core and have encountered a new challenge," the tweet, which is written from the rover's first-person perspective, reads. "Seems some pebble-sized debris is obstructing my robotic arm from handing off the tube for sealing/storage."
The sample in question was collected on Dec. 29, extracted from the core of a rock — marking only the sixth time in the history of human space exploration that a rock was cored on a planet other than Earth. But when the rover went to pass the collection tube along through the automated process by which gathered samples are stored, the process was interrupted when "our sensors detected an anomaly," according to NASA.
As Perseverance attempted to move the sample tube from the percussive drill used to core rocks into the "bit carousel" where samples are staged for storage, it encountered an unusual amount of resistance. The rover's engineers asked Perseverance for more data and images in the hopes of understanding what the issue was, but it took extra time because of the distance involved in communicating with a semi-autonomous rover situated more than 200 million miles from Earth.
Clarity came on Jan. 6, when the struggling sample tube was extracted and images of the obstruction were beamed back to Earth.
"These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris," NASA's post reads. "The team is confident that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube." That's why there was a struggle transferring the tube to the bit carousel: One or more annoying, little rocks got in the way.
It's nothing the Perseverance team didn't anticipate happening at some point during the rover's mission. But this is the first time the collection process has had to pause for "debris removal," and "we want to take whatever time is necessary to ensure these pebbles exit in a controlled and orderly fashion."
It's not clear if any of the offending pebbles are related to an Earthbound pet rock named Rocco. But you can bet Elmo has thoughts about all of this.
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
