Landed near a 3-billion-year-old lake
NASA robot fails to retrieve a rock sample from Mars
For a robot that has been drilling for months on the Red Planet.
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The US space agency (NASA) announced yesterday that the rover robot "Perseverance" failed in its attempt to take a piece of rock from Mars, the first of about 30 samples scheduled to be returned to Earth within years for analysis.
The agency earlier published pictures that clearly showed a small mound next to the spacecraft's shadow with a hole in its middle, the first that the robot dug on the Red Planet.
"The collection of samples has begun," Thomas Zurbuchen, the director of science at the US Space Agency, wrote on Twitter at the time.
But the data sent back to Earth by the craft indicates that no sample was collected on this first attempt.
It is expected that the process of collecting a sample, which is the size of chalk and is placed inside a tightly closed tube, about 11 days.
The move aims to search for signs of ancient life, such as traces of fossilized microbial life in rocks, and to better understand the geology of Mars.
The mobile robot, about the size of a large SUV, landed in February at Jezero Crater, which scientists believe housed a deep lake 3.5 billion years ago.
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