Mars in High-Def (Mars Exploration Rover): Perseverance’s Sol 1192 Photo Reveal

Perseverance’s SHERLOC Instrument Resumes Search for Signs of Ancient Life on Mars

We kept a close watch on the northern river channel as we progressed, in search of an area where the dunes were sufficiently diminutive and spaced out, allowing a rover to navigate through them.

Mars Exploration Rover

In 2024, the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission continues to be a topic of interest, particularly with the ongoing operations of NASA’s Perseverance rover. While the original MER mission involved the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which concluded their missions in 2010 and 2018 respectively, the legacy of Mars exploration has been carried forward by Perseverance, which landed on Mars in February 2021.

Perseverance’s Mission Highlights in 2024:

Mars is hard, and bringing instruments back from the brink is even harder,” said Perseverance project manager Art Thompson of JPL. “But the team never gave up. With SHERLOC back online, we’re continuing our explorations and sample collection with a full complement of science instruments.”

Perseverance is in the later stages of its fourth science campaign, looking for evidence of carbonate and olivine deposits in the “Margin Unit,” an area along the inside of Jezero Crater’s rim. On Earth, carbonates typically form in the shallows of freshwater or alkaline lakes. It is hypothesized that this also might be the case for the Margin Unit, which formed over 3 billion years ago.

After six months of intensive effort, the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has come back online and successfully analyzed a rock target with its spectrometer and camera. SHERLOC plays a crucial role in the mission’s search for potential signs of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

SHERLOC Saga

In January 2022, SHERLOC encountered an issue that prevented it from collecting data. The instrument’s movable lens cover, designed to protect the spectrometer and one of its cameras from dust, had become frozen in a position that blocked the instrument’s operations.

The SHERLOC team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California immediately sprang into action. They conducted a thorough analysis, identifying the malfunction of a small motor responsible for moving the protective lens cover as well as adjusting the focus for the spectrometer and the Autofocus and Context Imager (ACI) camera.

Team’s next step was to test potential solutions on a duplicate SHERLOC instrument at JPL. They tried various approaches, including heating the lens cover’s motor, commanding the rover’s robotic arm to rotate the SHERLOC instrument in different orientations, rocking the mechanism back and forth to dislodge any debris, and even engaging the rover’s percussive drill to try to jostle the lens cover loose.

Six months of running diagnostics, testing, imagery and data analysis, troubleshooting, and retesting couldn’t come with a better conclusion,” said SHERLOC principal investigator Kevin Hand of JPL.

Overcoming Challenges

On March 3, the team’s efforts paid off when the ACI cover opened more than 180 degrees, clearing the imager’s field of view and allowing SHERLOC to be placed near its target. However, the team still faced the challenge of focusing the instrument, as without proper focus, the images would be blurry and the spectral signal would be weak.

Leveraging the rover’s robotic arm, the team conducted a series of tests to determine the optimal distance for SHERLOC to be placed from its target. After extensive testing on Earth and Mars, they found that a distance of approximately 40 millimeters (1.58 inches) provided the best data quality.

Rover’s robotic arm is amazing. It can be commanded in small, quarter-millimeter steps to help us evaluate SHERLOC’s new focus position, and it can place SHERLOC with high accuracy on a target,” said Kyle Uckert, SHERLOC deputy principal investigator at JPL.

Road Ahead

With SHERLOC now operational again, the Perseverance team is excited to resume the instrument’s crucial role in the mission’s search for signs of ancient microbial life on Mars. Mounted on the rover’s robotic arm, SHERLOC uses two cameras and a laser spectrometer to scour the Martian landscape for organic compounds and minerals that may have been altered by watery environments, potentially revealing evidence of past microbial activity.

Successful recovery of SHERLOC is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of the NASA team, who have overcome numerous challenges to ensure the instrument’s continued operation. As Perseverance continues its exploration of the Jezero Crater, the data collected by SHERLOC will be invaluable in the ongoing quest to uncover the secrets of Mars’ ancient past.