Taken on March 2
NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars last year, seems to have encountered a little trouble, a few centimeters of Mars rock, firmly stuck on its wheels, how to shake off, has lasted for at least a month, how much impact does it have on the rover? Will it lead to the failure of the Perseverance mission?
The Perseverance rover weighs 1 ton and is fitted with 6 sturdy aluminum wheels, which are designed on the basis of Curiosity to avoid the situation that Curiosity will be punctured by Martian rocks for a long time.
Perseverance's six wheels were also reduced in width to 52.5 centimeters in diameter, with non-slip nails for traction and curved titanium spokes for elastic support, which could climb over rocks 40 centimeters, about the height of a human knee.
Thanks to the wheel design and powertrain, perseverance can reach a top speed of 4.2 cm/s, or 152 m/h. Well, you don't have to laugh dumbly, this is already a high speed on Mars, driving 4.38 kilometers in just one year, much better than the old Curiosity. China's Zhurong landed three months later and has now traveled 1.5 kilometers (until the end of January).
Needless to say, there is no need to say how important the rover's wheels are, but recently perseverance's ground team found that one of its wheels was stuck with a Piece of Martian rock.
Photographed on February 25
It's hard for you to imagine how a rock could get stuck, it looks like it's just there, and the wheel should fall off as soon as it turns.
But the rock did get stuck, as you can tell from the images taken by the car's left front shelter camera (Hazcam) on Feb. 25 and March 2, and for five days the rock was in that position, motionless.
A journalist, Amanda Kooser, looked at previously published original images from NASA and found that the rock had been around since at least Feb. 6. For more than a month, the Perseverance traveled that long distance again, which meant that the rock might have been stuck and could not be shaken off.
Photo of February 6
So that answers our previous question about whether the rock will affect the rover's operation or not— a month has passed, and Perseverance doesn't seem to care much about its existence, let alone cause the rover mission to fail.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory also confirmed that there is currently nothing wrong with the rock.
It looks like this rock really feels like it's resting there, how could it get stuck? It's really incredible, is it that the wheel found that there was a problem with the dynamic balance and added a counterweight block? The question is that Mars is now more than 300 million kilometers from Earth, who did it?