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There’s some good news from Mars, and there’s some odd news from Mars. First, the good news: NASA’s Perseverance rover successfully collected its 12th rock core sample, stashing away a tiny bit of the red planet in a tube for safekeeping. Now, for the weird news: the rover team noticed some mysterious objects stuck on the sample system.
As part of its post-sampling routine, the rover takes up-close pictures of some of the sampling system components. «On those images, two small pieces of debris were visible — a small object on the coring bit (stored in the bit carousel) and a small hairline object on the drill chuck,» NASA JPL Project Manager Art Thompson wrote in a rover update on Friday.
The hairline object is easy to spot in an image from Aug. 4 as highlighted in the update.
