Close-up view of Cheyava Falls natural surface on Mars
where chunks of olivine (pale green) in the straight veins and leopard spots in
the center are seen.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
In January 2024, the SHERLOC instrument aboard NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover encountered a significant issue. A fault in the instrument's motor caused the dust cover and autofocus
mechanism to become inoperative, putting the rover’s SHERLOC Raman spectroscopy
capability at risk.
Although Mars had posed an
unexpected challenge, members of the SHERLOC operations team working together
with the rover engineers refused to give up.
Fortunately, a motion of the arm on
Sol 1077, almost exactly two months after the original issue occurred, resulted
in the dust cover moving to a nearly fully open position. As a result, the team
began to look for ways to focus the optics and operate SHERLOC with the dust
cover in this open position. These efforts involved many trials and errors,
several rounds of diagnostic examinations, analyses, and troubleshooting around
the clock.
And as they say, “It does not
matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop”.
After much hard work and
persistence, the team successfully brought the SHERLOC instrument back online in June 2024 with a successful observation of
the rock target Walhalla Glades. It was just the start of an exciting summer for SHERLOC.
In July 2024, SHERLOC’s Raman
capability, whose destiny was uncertain a month ago, performed multiple
calibrations, scans, and observations on a rock named “Cheyava Falls” and the
team was thrilled to discover the mission’s most compelling evidence for organics
in the Jezero crater. Organic compounds can be formed through biological or
non-biological processes and the organics that SHERLOC observed in Cheyava
Falls would need to be studied in laboratories here on Earth for their origin
to be determined. Regardless of how they formed, the Cheyava Falls organics
could tell us a great deal about the Red Planet’s past and present carbon
inventory, a possible early carbon cycle, and the precursor conditions to life
as we know it.
It is an important and exciting
juncture in Mars exploration and astrobiology. This year, the SHERLOC
instrument beat the odds and made one of the most exciting discoveries of the
Mars 2020 mission. As the mission encounters and overcomes problems like that
experienced by SHERLOC, we find that exploring Mars can also lead to
discovering the team’s persistence and Perseverance.
Written by Anushree Srivastava, Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Institution. Member of Mars 2020 SHERLOC Science and Operations Team
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