The goal of the Mars Sample Return campaign is to collect soil samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for further study. The samples will be acquired and stored in metal tubes by the Perseverance rover and deposited on the Martian surface. As part of this campaign, it is expected that the Sample Fetch Rover will be in charge of localizing and gathering up to 35 sample tubes over 150 Martian sols. Autonomous capabilities are critical for the success of the overall campaign and for the Sample Fetch Rover in particular. This work proposes a novel system architecture for the autonomous detection and pose estimation of the sample tubes. For the detection stage, a Deep Neural Network and transfer learning from a synthetic dataset are proposed. The dataset is created from photorealistic 3D simulations of Martian scenarios. Additionally, the sample tubes poses are estimated using Computer Vision techniques such as contour detection and line fitting on the detected area. Finally, laboratory tests of the Sample Localization procedure are performed using the ExoMars Testing Rover on a Mars-like testbed. These tests validate the proposed approach in different hardware architectures, providing promising results related to the sample detection and pose estimation.

NASA's Perseverance rover has tried out a nifty new feature for the first time, which let it'spit out' a piece of Mars rock that had been clogging its sampling tube. The trick means that Perseverance can now continue taking samples of rock from the Red Planet to search for possible signs of ancient life. The SUV-sized vehicle has been on the Red Planet since February 2021, and is slowly trundling through the Jezero Crater taking rock samples for later retrieval. On December 29, while retrieving a sample from a rock, its sixth so far, NASA engineers found they couldn't get the rock to go into the storage area. This was due to a pebble-sized piece of debris obstructing the robotic arm, blocking the entrance to the tube docking area - nearly a month later, this has been solved. NASA used an untested'un-choking procedure', that involved pointing the drill containing a clogged test tube towards the ground and rotating it at high speed.

NASA's Perseverance rover hit a snag while trying to capture its latest piece of rock from Mars, with a pebble-sized bit of debris stopping it from storing the sample. The SUV-sized vehicle has been on the Red Planet since February 2021, and is slowly trundling through the Jezero Crater taking rock samples for later retrieval. The Perseverance team, tweeting as the rover, wrote: 'I recently captured my sixth rock core and have encountered a new challenge. Seems some pebble-sized debris is obstructing my robotic arm from handing off the tube for sealing/storage.' It retrieved the sample on December 29, or sol 306 on Mars, where it successfully cored and extracted the sample, but the transfer to the tube failed. On January 7, NASA discovered there was a small piece of rock inside the entrance to the tube docking area, blocking it from entering.

The Mars Perseverance rover's sample collection has run into a snag. NASA reports the rover stopped caching samples after debris partly blocked the bit carousel (the device that stores drill bits and passes sample tubes for internal processing). The rover encountered the anomaly on December 29th, but the mission team had to wait until January 6th to send a command to extract the drill bit, undock the robot arm from the carousel and take images to verify what happened. The obstacles are believed to be pebbles that fell out of the sample tube when dropping off the coring bit, preventing that bit from sitting neatly in the carousel. The storage is crucial for NASA's plans to eventually return the samples to Earth.

Singapore is well known for its tough laws (and penalties for flouting them). Now it has a new ally in the fight against chewing gum, littering and bigger misdemeanors. The country has started testing a robot named Xavier. Over the next three weeks, Xavier robots will monitor the crowds of Singapore's Toa Payoh Central to look for what the nation's authorities describe as "undesirable social behaviors" -- including any group of people. The country's current COVID-19 safety measure forbids congregations of more than five people. To gauge the crowds, Xavier models have cameras that create 360-degree views.

As the Perseverance rover drilled into a rock on Wednesday to collect a sample from Jezero Crater on Mars, Justin Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, felt both nervous and excited. He has the honor of serving as the "sample shepherd," leading the effort from millions of miles away, but the pressure's on. "These samples not only will allow us to understand the geology of the crater, but also minerals likely related to the history of water there," he said yesterday. But first, the rover had to actually capture a chunk of rock in a test tube-sized container. An initial attempt in early August had come up empty.

NASA has been waiting six months for Perseverance to collect its inaugural Mars core samples, but the American space Agency will have to wait a little longer after the rover failed during its first attempt. The percussive drill, coring bit and sample tube processing all worked'as intended, but data shows the sample tube was empty following extraction. The rover carries 43 titanium sample tubes, and is exploring Jezero Crater, where it will be gathering samples of rock and regolith (broken rock and dust) for future analysis on Earth. NASA scientists are currently analyzing the data with the hopes of finding the blunder and hopes to have a better understanding of what may occurred in the next few weeks. Jennifer Trosper, project manager for Perseverance at JPL, said in a statement: 'The initial thinking is that the empty tube is more likely a result of the rock target not reacting the way we expected during coring, and less likely a hardware issue with the Sampling and Caching System.

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has stumbled into an issue during its first sampling attempt. "#SamplingMars is one of my most complicated tasks. Early pics and data show a successful drill hole, but no sample in the tube–something we've never seen in testing on Earth," the rover's Twitter account announced on Friday. In a release from the agency, the Southern California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which leads the mission wrote that data sent back to Earth after Perseverance's first rock sampling attempt indicated "no rock was collected." The 2,260-pound rover carries 43 titanium sample tubes in its mission to search for interesting rocks and sediment – potentially leading to signs of ancient microbial life on the red planet – and is exploring Jezero Crater: the region where it first landed in February. "While this is not the'hole-in-one' we hoped for, there is always risk with breaking new ground," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

A potential Mars Sample Return (MSR) architecture is being jointly studied by NASA and ESA. As currently envisioned, the MSR campaign consists of a series of 3 missions: sample cache, fetch and return to Earth. In this paper, we focus on the fetch part of the MSR, and more specifically the problem of autonomously detecting and localizing sample tubes deposited on the Martian surface. Towards this end, we study two machine-vision based approaches: First, a geometry-driven approach based on template matching that uses hard-coded filters and a 3D shape model of the tube; and second, a data-driven approach based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and learned features. Furthermore, we present a large benchmark dataset of sample-tube images, collected in representative outdoor environments and annotated with ground truth segmentation masks and locations. The dataset was acquired systematically across different terrain, illumination conditions and dust-coverage; and benchmarking was performed to study the feasibility of each approach, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and robustness in the presence of adverse environmental conditions.

Martian rocks could be locked down in quarantine on the moon to prevent them from contaminating Earth and creating a War of the Worlds-style disaster, an expert has claimed. Interplanetary infection is a major concern for ongoing space exploration, and all avenues are being investigated to ensure both Earth and Mars remain clean. Storing Martian rocks on the moon is being looked at as a potential solution as it would prevent the creation of a direct path to Earth's fragile ecosystems. This 150,000-mile (400,000-km) barrier would present its own issues, scientists acknowledge, but could offer invaluable protection to life on Earth. NASA and ESA are working together on the Mars2020 project which which will see two rovers roaming the red planet in search of alien life, among other goals.