Elmo is not the only one who is having a hard time with a small rock.
On Friday, NASA's account for the Mars-researching Perseverance rover sent out some news and a set of photos to go with it, saying that the rover is having trouble keeping its latest sample of the Mars landscape.
It's possible that Tweet has been deleted.
"I recently captured my sixth rock core and have encountered a new challenge," the rover's first-person perspective reads. It seems that some pebble-sized debris is preventing my robotic arm from handing off the tube.
Only the sixth time in the history of human space exploration that a rock was cored on a planet other than Earth, a sample was collected on December 29th. When the rover went to pass the collection tube through the automated process, the process was interrupted because of an "anomaly" according to NASA.
The sample tube from the percussive drill used to core rocks encountered an unusual amount of resistance as Perseverance attempted to move it into the "bit carousel" where samples are staged for storage. The engineers of the rover asked Perseverance for more data and images in order to understand what was going on, but it took them more time because of the distance involved.
On January 6, the sample tube was removed and images of the obstruction were beamed back to Earth.
There are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris inside the bit carousel, according to the most recent downlinked images. The team believes that these are fragments of the cored rock that fell out of the sample tube. There was a struggle to transfer the tube to the carousel because there were rocks in the way.
The Perseverance team didn't anticipate anything happening during the rover's mission. This is the first time the collection process has had to pause fordebris 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 pebbles are related to the pet rock named Rocco. Elmo has thoughts about this.
