It seems like NASA is blaming a non-living object for not being a good sample while not looking at the possibility that maybe, the rover wasn’t programmed properly to pick up the rocks in the first place.
Recently NASA has been working with Perseverance, the robotic rover that is currently on Mars with the mission to gather rock samples from the planet’s surface and send them back to Earth. But seems like the rover is on a rocky road (no pun intended) and is having difficulties in completing his tasks.
Last week, Perseverance successfully drilled a hole into the Jezero Crater which is located along the margins of one of the larger basins in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The rover was then supposed to collect samples from the drilling site which it supposedly did, but when NASA looked at the image of the storage tube, they realized it was empty. It was the perfect example of “You had one job!” but according to the Perseverance team, it wasn’t the rover’s fault but the rock was the main culprit. Yup, you read that right.
According to the scientists, the rock was too crumbly to be picked up by Perseverance which resulted in it falling back to the ground. And not only that but it seems like the Martian land is playing tricks on the rover by disguising a loose rock sample as a strong and sturdy material. “There is reasonable confidence that this is a one-off, weird rock that we were attracted to in some ways precisely because it was weird,” commented Farley, from the Perseverance team. Because obviously, it wasn’t Perseverance’s fault that its delicately crafted tools couldn’t pick up the samples in the first place. This is the perfect example of parents who blame other kids but can never see the fault in their own children.
