NASA's Perseverance rover almost had to let go of a precious drill bit on Mars after an attempt to collect a rock sample went awry.
For the past week, the car-sized lab on wheels seemed to remain in its location on the rim of Jezero crater. Meanwhile, a team of scientists and engineers on Earth focused on how to free the tool from the rock.
Anyone who has used a power drill around the house knows the frustration of getting one stuck in a board or wall, without being able to yank it back out. Well, sometimes the U.S. space agency has to retrieve a stuck drill, too — but from roughly 132 million miles away.
Fortunately, Perseverance didn't have to sacrifice the coring bit. A NASA spokesperson provided an update on the status of the rover on Wednesday.
"The team was working to extract a drill bit from the most recent sample collection attempt, which was successfully accomplished as of late Tuesday night," NASA told Mashable. "This type of situation was planned for in the rover's design, and there are other drill bits onboard if needed."
Jezero Crater is a site on the Red Planet where scientists believe a river once emptied into a delta. The reason scientists now want to explore the rim is to look for ancient Martian bedrock rubble. Jezero formed when something substantial smacked into the planet close to 4 billion years ago. The impact could have churned up and tossed deep materials to the surface.
Recently, Perseverance has been studying the makeup of layered rocks in an area NASA dubbed Witch Hazel Hill. Scientists want to understand the relationship between the alternating light and dark bands, as each likely formed under different conditions. Based on how layers are stacked, experts may be able to piece together a timeline for the Martian region.
Earlier this month, the rover sampled one of the light-toned layers, which consisted of tiny rock pieces. In the latest coring attempt, the team was grabbing a sample of the darker grains. Raw images beamed back from the rover's cameras to Earth indicated the drill may have been stuck since April 22.
Before Perseverance was launched, NASA equipped it with nine bits: one for Martian soil, two for removing the dust-covered outer layer of a rock, and six for drilling rock cores. It's unclear how many the rover still has in its arsenal and how many have succumbed to the rugged conditions of the Red Planet.
Since landing on Mars in 2021, Perseverance has filled sample tubes with rocks and dirt. NASA's goal has been to retrieve at least some of them and get them to Earth in the 2030s.
Exceptional rock discoveries have only mounted pressure on NASA to solve the problems facing its Mars Sample Return mission, its plan to fly bits of rock, dust, and air collected by the rover back to Earth. Last summer, Perseverance discovered a spotted rock with the most compelling signs of ancient Martian life yet, though a sample would need to be shipped back home for confirmation.
But that mission has been in limbo since a review found it would cost upward of $11 billion and take nearly two decades to achieve. NASA engaged the greater aerospace industry for input on how to wrangle in spending.
The agency is now investigating two new approaches that could bring costs under $8 billion, involving either a commercial lander or the tried-and-true sky crane, the landing system that brought the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers to the Martian surface in the first place. The options could potentially shorten the timeframe to get the samples home.
NASA will spend the next year working on engineering plans for the revised mission.
