NASA engineers have carried out one other exceptional feat of distant debugging and restored the SHERLOC instrument of the Perseverance Mars rover to operation.
SHERLOC (Scanning Liveable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemical substances) is mounted on the rover’s arm and makes use of two cameras and a laser spectrometer to hunt for natural compounds and minerals in rocks.
Discovering indicators of those markers would possibly level to proof of previous microbial life on the Purple Planet. Looking for environments which may as soon as have been able to supporting microbial life and searching for signatures of that life are two of Perseverance’s science targets, so an issue with SHERLOC is inconvenient regardless of overlap with different devices on the rover.
The problem was not with the cameras or spectrometer however with one of many two covers designed to maintain mud off the devices’ optics. Earlier this 12 months, the quilt grew to become frozen in place. This stemmed from a malfunction within the motor that each strikes the quilt and adjusts the main focus for the spectrometer and one of many cameras, the Autofocus and Context Imager.
Getting the mud cowl to open required shaking the SHERLOC instrument. Engineers began by rotating the rover’s arm earlier than attempting the percussive drill to loosen particles that would doubtlessly jam the lens cowl.
By March, though the quilt had opened sufficiently to not obscure the imager, the lack of the main focus motor meant that pictures would stay blurry. The subsequent step was to make use of Perseverance’s arm instead.
Kyle Uckert, SHERLOC deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, stated: “The rover’s robotic arm is superb. It may be commanded in small, quarter-millimeter steps to assist us consider SHERLOC’s new focus place, and it may place SHERLOC with excessive accuracy on a goal.
“After testing first on Earth after which on Mars, we found out the perfect distance for the robotic arm to put SHERLOC is about 40 millimeters [1.58 inches]. At that distance, the info we accumulate must be pretty much as good as ever.”
“Six months of working diagnostics, testing, imagery and information evaluation, troubleshooting, and retesting could not include a greater conclusion,” stated SHERLOC principal investigator Kevin Hand of JPL.
Perseverance arrived on Mars in 2021 for a main mission period of 1 Martian 12 months (roughly 687 Earth days). It has comfortably exceeded these expectations and is presently in its fourth science marketing campaign.
Whereas engineers are to be applauded for developing with an answer for the problem, the incident highlights that regardless of the creativity of the JPL staff, each rover will ultimately put on out within the harsh setting of Mars. ®