Perseverance's First Drill Attempt Comes Up Empty, and That's Fine
NASA's Perseverance rover drilled its first Martian rock sample, but the tube came back empty — here's why that's not actually a failure.
NASA confirmed yesterday that Perseverance’s first attempt to core a sample of Martian rock didn’t go as planned. The rover drilled into a rock nicknamed a “paver rock” for its flat, sidewalk-like appearance, but telemetry sent back to Earth showed the sample tube came back empty. The leading theory is that the rock itself just wasn’t up to the job — it likely crumbled during the drilling process instead of yielding a clean core.
If you were hoping for a big symbolic first-sample-in-hand moment, I get the disappointment. But it’s worth separating “empty tube” from “failure,” because those aren’t the same thing here.
What actually happened
Perseverance uses a rotary-percussive drill on the end of its 7-foot robotic arm to core out cylindrical rock samples about the size of a piece of chalk, then seals them into titanium tubes for eventual return to Earth (on a mission that’s still years away from even launching, let alone landing). The drilling itself apparently went fine mechanically — the arm, the bit, the coring hardware all did what they were supposed to do. The problem seems to be the target: the paver rock was likely too soft or fractured to hold together as a core, crumbling into dust or fragments that didn’t stay in the tube.
NASA’s team says the attempt still produced useful engineering data — how the drill performs on this kind of terrain, how the sample-handling system behaves end to end — and, notably, the tube did capture the mission’s first sample of the Martian atmosphere. That atmospheric sample alone has scientific value for future analysis, even without any rock.
Why this isn’t a big deal
This is exactly the kind of thing a mission with 30-plus sample tubes on board is built to absorb. Perseverance didn’t fly to Mars with the expectation of nailing every single drill target. The rock at Jezero Crater is a mixed bag geologically, and part of the mission’s job is figuring out, empirically, which rocks are actually good candidates for sampling versus which just look promising from orbital and rover-cam imagery.
The team is already scouting a new target for a second attempt. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens within the next couple of weeks, depending on how confident they are reading the new rock’s structure from a distance.
The bigger picture here: this is basically field geology conducted by remote control from 130 million miles away, with a many-minute communication lag and no way to physically inspect anything except through cameras and instruments. A first swing missing isn’t a setback so much as it’s the process working as intended — you learn from the rock that didn’t cooperate and adjust your approach for the next one. I’ll be watching for updates on target number two.