Crumbly Mars Rock, Not Hardware Flaws, Scuttled Perseverance's First Sample Attempt

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August 12, 2021

Dear Reader, This week, we're rocking out. Last Friday, NASA's Perseverance Mars rover set space scientists on edge when it failed to drilled its first-ever rock sample. If the failure had been due to some fatal flaw in the rover's hardware, it could have scuttled the entire multinational, multibillion-dollar effort to someday return Perseverance's hoped-for treasure trove of Martian materials to Earth. Instead, however, the flaw turned out to be with the rock itself, which apparently crumbled to dust before it could be stored. That whooshing sound you might hear is a sigh of relief from Mars-focused researchers around the globe. Elsewhere, we have stories about new particle physics discoveries, bumper crops of black holes, math's troubling patriarchal past and more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Planetary Science Crumbly Mars Rock, Not Hardware Flaws, Scuttled Perseverance's First Sample Attempt After an alarming failure, the rover is set to continue its mission to retrieve specimens for eventual return to Earth By Robin George Andrews

Space Exploration NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover Foiled in First Attempt to Grab Rock for Return to Earth Seeking to collect its inaugural core sample, the mission hopes to begin what could be humanity's boldest search for extraterrestrial life By Robin George Andrews

Particle Physics Exotic Four-Quark Particle Spotted at Large Hadron Collider The rare tetraquark is one of dozens of nonelementary particles discovered at the accelerator and could help test theories about the strong nuclear force By Davide Castelvecchi,Nature magazine

Space Exploration The Ethics of Sending Humans to Mars We need to avoid the mistakes European countries made during the age of colonization By Nicholas Dirks

Black Holes Astronomers Find an Unexpected Bumper Crop of Black Holes In trying to explain the spectacular star trails of the star cluster Palomar 5, astronomers stumbled on a very large trove of black holes. By Christopher Intagliata | 03:24

Space & Physics O UFOs, Where Art Thou? Five reasons why sorting all of this out is so scientifically challenging By Caleb A. Scharf

Mathematics Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past Mathematicians want to think their field is a meritocracy, but bias, harassment and exclusion persist By Rachel Crowell

Quantum Computing How Quantum Computing Could Remake Chemistry It will bring molecular modeling to a new level of accuracy, reducing researchers' reliance on serendipity By Jeannette M. Garcia

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Space & Physics, Volume 4, Issue 4

QUOTE OF THE DAY "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" Ken Farley, Perseverance Mars rover project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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FROM THE ARCHIVE Dark Matter's Last Stand A new experiment could catch invisible particles that previous detectors have not By Clara Moskowitz | April 2021

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