Last week, NASA’s Perseverance rover shot for a new milestone in the search for extraterrestrial life: drilling into Mars to extract a plug of rock, which will eventually get fired back to Earth for scientists to study. Data sent to NASA scientists early on August 6 indicated a victory—the robot had indeed drilled into the red planet, and a photo even showed a dust pile around the borehole.
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| NASA |
But, while data indicated that Perseverance had transferred a sample tube into its belly for storage, that tube was in fact empty, driving Katie Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist of the Mars 2020 mission, to call it “the case of the missing core.”
While this is not the 'hole in one' we hoped for, there is always risk with breaking new ground," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a statement. (Perseverance's mission is the first step in a Mars sample-return campaign, which has never been done before.)
Read the full story at ARS Technica
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