NASA’s Perseverance staff announced that the Mars rover managed to dislodge the pebbles clogging its pattern cache system, an issue that has vexed the robotic since final month.

The sampling caching system is arguably essentially the most important element of the Perseverance mission, as analyzing Martian rocks intimately will contribute to all of NASA’s Mars goals: determining if life ever existed on the planet, understanding its historic local weather and geology, and making ready for human exploration there. The samples collected by Perseverance will probably be dropped at Earth in the early 2030s, if all goes based on plan.

But that is Mars, so hardly ever does a plan not encounter a snag or two. In Perseverance’s case, the most up-to-date problem occurred when the rover was caching a pattern it cored from a rock known as Issole. Some rock fell out of the pattern tube because it was being put into the bit carousel, a lazy-Susan-like contraption meant to retailer the rock samples on the rover. (The rover has 43 pattern tubes aboard, seven of which have been stuffed to date).

As it turned out (and as a few of our readers prompt), the rocks lastly got here free after some shaking. First, the rover rotated the bit carousel, a transfer that cleared the 2 rocks that stopped the rover from processing the Issole pattern. To hold monitor of the rover’s try, mission controllers studied the variations between photos taken earlier than and after the corrective actions. The ejected pebbles had been picked up by the rover’s Mastcam-Z digital camera.

Then, the staff turned to eradicating the remaining rock contained in the pattern tube, in order that they might save that tube for one more coring try. “We essentially shook the heck out of it for 208 seconds—by means of the percussive function on the drill,” reported Rick Welch, a deputy undertaking supervisor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in a current blog post. The maneuver was successful, and the tube will now be reused.

But two smaller pebbles had been nonetheless caught. The NASA staff decided they wouldn’t jam the rover, although, and figured they might shake free via some driving. Indeed, the Perseverance staff reported on January 25 that the rover backed up onto some close by rocks, tilting the robotic, after which twisted one wheel. In that course of, the remaining rocks fell out of the $2.7 billion vehicle.

Now that Perseverance has handed the stones, it will possibly return to the 2-year undertaking at hand: accumulating extra rocks, the proper approach.

More: NASA Has a Plan to Dislodge the Pebbles Stuck in Perseverance Rover