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

The Perseverance Mars rover acquired this image of pebble-size debris in the bit carousel on Jan. 7, 2022. The image was taken to help the Perseverance team diagnose an abnormality that occurred during a rock sampling. The image is from NASA/JPL-Caltech.

NASA's Perseverance rover will dump its latest Mars sample to get rid of pebbles from its drill.
Perseverance mission managers made an announcement on Friday that they had to dump out the latest sample from Percy. One of the main goals of Perseverance is to pick up Mars samples for future analysis, and the team shared in the post that they never thought they would have to do that.

"I didn't think we would do this maneuver," wrote the project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We are returning the remaining contents of Sample Tube 261, our latest cored-rock sample, back to its planet of origin.

The latest Mars photos can be found at NASA's Perseverance rover.

The stuck debris was reported to the public via the mission's account and a previous post. Engineers are working to clear the problem without causing any damage to the craft. This fix will require that Percy be in place for a while.

JPL has taken a number of steps to figure out a solution. She said that they would have a good idea of what the rocks and pebbles are. Trosper did not elaborate on what "terrestrial experimentation" entails.

She reported that pre-launch testing on Earth showed that it was easy to evacuate the drill's collection tube, although this hasn't been tested on Mars, where the gravity is a quarter that of our own planet's.
The procedure to point the open end of the sample tube toward the surface of Mars was likely completed over the weekend, according to Trosper. The results are expected on Tuesday.

She said that the commands will ask the rover to do rotation tests of its bit carousel to assess pebble movement, and that more information will come from new pictures taken underneath Perseverance.

The team is not sure how much of the cored rock is still in the tube, but they may attempt to redo the coring procedure if the evacuate goes well. Perseverance is caching samples for a planned sample-return mission.

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