Slashdot Mirror
NASA Rover May Contaminate Its Samples of Mars
sciencehabit writes "The Curiosity rover will definitely find evidence of an advanced civilization if it lands safely on Mars. That's because rock samples the rover drills are likely to be contaminated with bits of Teflon from the rover's machinery, NASA announced during a press teleconference. The bits of Teflon can then mix with the sample, which will be vaporized for analysis. The problem for the scientists is that Teflon is two-thirds carbon — the same element they are looking for on Mars."
Fortunately, this problem isn't a showstopper: "...there are still mitigation steps to take if SAM's analysis is potentially compromised. Contaminant production appears to be stronger in the drill's percussion mode, when it pounds powerfully and rapidly on Martian rock. So ratcheting the percussion down, or switching over to the more gentle rotary mode, may make the issue more manageable. If that doesn't work, the MSL team could just take the drill out of commission, solely scooping soil instead of also boring into rock. Curiosity could still access the interior of some Martian rocks by rolling over them with its wheels, Grotzinger said. But all in all, he's confident that the team will figure things out in the next month or two."
I think somebody had another English-metric goof when they were doing their stoichiometry.
(CF2)n -> 24% carbon, 76% fluorine by mass, at least by my calculations.
It sounds like the teflon is from rings higher up in the assembly. It's not like they covered the bit in teflon and later did a full-on Picard facepalm.
They seem optimistic that they'll be able to work around it. I guess these lessons come with the territory when operating hugely complex projects to other friggin planets.
Right now, the rover is in *space*. I can definitely understand catching this problem in simulations or in on-Earth tests, or catching it belatedly when they finally get to Mars and wonder why all the rocks contain fluorine, but in space? Only thing I can think of is "someone re-ran some simulations and noticed they messed up", which doesn't seem very probable (unless the engineers had been suspecting this since before launch, and only now have sufficient "proof").
Then again, I'm not a rocket scientist, so I probably missed something.
They probably have an identical unit to mess with locally in case of electrics problems. If something goes wrong in space it is extremely helpful to have a physical replica you can actually put your hands on and experiment with to find the best fix.
Well, at least the samples won't get stuck.