I wrote an article 10 days ago about NASA's Perseverance rover that landed on Mars early last year, because the rotating device was stuck in a rock, one of the most important missions was in danger of dying, and the ground team was trying to find a way to fix it.
Today finally came the good news, the problem of perseverance has been completely solved, and the method used is really the method that netizens joked about!
Perseverance landed on Mars on February 18 last year, nearly three months before China's Zhurong. One of perseverance's most important missions is to collect Mars samples, store them in rovers, and save them for later missions to retrieve.
After collecting 7 samples, the ground personnel encountered a thunderbolt on a sunny day, and when the first blow was struck, the newly acquired rock sample actually fell out and stuck on the rotating device that sent the sample to the turntable, and the sample tube could no longer be put in!
Mars at this time about 330 million kilometers from the earth, a signal will take more than 18 minutes to arrive, perseverance alone in the Mars Jezero impact crater, if you can not take out the stuck rock, the remaining more than 30 sample tubes will not be able to put into the storage warehouse, the future can return to the earth spacecraft to Mars, can only retrieve a lonely.
The ground team wanted to cry without tears, not willing to let the most important mission end like this, and began to find ways to "repair" the rover 300 million kilometers away.
Netizens have also begun to come up with ideas, some netizens said that you can find a bumpy slope to let the rover drive at full speed; some people say that finding a slope to rush down and then a sharp brake, should be thrown out.
Some people say that if you let the rover roll on the stone on one side of the track, make the rover tilt, and then rotate the body back and forth, won't the stone fall?
NASA's ground team really did it!
They first rotated the turntable of the Perseverance drill bit by 75 degrees, and then turned back to its original position, and the images sent back showed that they had won the first battle, and two rock fragments fell out of the drill bit turntable and returned to Mars.
The scientists then decided to empty the valuable sample tube and re-sample it, pointing the drill bit at the ground, using the impact function of the drill bit to vibrate, and in 208 seconds, all the rock fragments were dumped on Mars.
However, there were two smaller pieces of debris stuck on the turntable, and the ground team thought they might not get stuck again, but they still reversed Perseverance to a nearby rock on January 25, tilted the rover, and then twisted a wheel - just like the netizens thought, the small earthquake moved, and the remaining debris fell out, perseverance was completely repaired, and the $2.7 billion rover was saved!
I believe that many people are not optimistic about this maintenance 300 million kilometers away, because there are too many covers in front of the car.
In May 2009, the Spirit rover fell into the sand and could not move, struggling for 7 months and failing to get out of the trap, NASA had to give up;
In June 2018, the Opportunity rover suffered a dust storm and lost contact after entering a dormant state, and 8 months later NASA announced the end of the mission;
In February 2019, InSight deployed the most important scientific instrument thermal sensing physics box on Mars, ready to drill into the depth of 5 meters under Mars with a self-hammering drill bit "Mole", but only drilled 35 centimeters, and it has been slipping and unable to penetrate. The ground team spent nearly two years salvaging, tried everything they could, and finally could not drill in, and finally declared the mission a failure in January 2021.
So Perseverance was really lucky to be able to repair the stuck turntable, hoping that in the future it would not have such a problem again, and successfully completed all sampling tasks.