2024 is a complicated year for NASA, and the latest example of this is Perseverance, which is facing a problem that could very significantly affect its operations, in the third bad report in a month and a half that we have been this year. . First, a few weeks ago we learned that unfortunately Ingenuity suffered an accident that marked the definitive end of her service on the red planet. However, we must remember that the helicopter was able to make many more flights than originally planned, making this part of the Perseverance mission a great success.

The bad news continued until a week ago when we found out Vogayer 1’s communications systems were sending meaningless data back to Earth. This is not the first time in its history that the veteran probe has had this problem, which appears to originate in the flight data system (FDS). The good news is that for now communication with the probe is maintained, so the technical teams can send orders to the Vogueyer, but even so, solving this problem is sure to be difficult.

And since there are no two without three, the US space agency is now reporting on it a problem that may prevent Perseverance from using all of its instruments to analyze and gather information on the Martian surface. The problem is limited to the rover’s SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescent for Organics and Chemicals) robotic arm, more precisely its mobile cover, which is used to prevent dust from accumulating on the rover’s optical elements. this tool.

The accumulation of dust on the surface may seem like a minor problem, but only if we forget that we are talking about a rover that is on the surface of Mars, so Providing any kind of physical assistance is completely impossible today.and that the instruments he uses must provide absolutely accurate data, since any error in the data provided to scientists on Earth can have far-reaching consequences for research.

The problem was originally discovered on January 6and engineering teams are currently conducting tests to see if adjusting the amount of power the enclosure receives can affect its operation. However, we’ll have to wait and see what happens if these tests don’t fix the crash, as at least at the moment there’s no information on other alternative means to try to fix the problem.

However, it should be noted that even though this problem persists, Persistence will be able to continue to carry out an important part of its operations. But let’s keep our fingers crossed that the problem can be solved.