7 shows the debris obstructing the bit carousel on NASA's Perseverance rover.

It chokes them with dust, roughs up their wheels and messes with their probes, and now it's throwing a new challenge at NASA's Perseverance rover.

"However, during the transfer of the bit that contains the sample into the rover's bit carousel (which stores bits and passes tubes to the tube processing hardware inside the rover), our sensors indicated an anomaly," wrote Louise Jandura, chief engineer for sampling and caching, in a blog post on Friday.

The rover halted its sampling activities when it met unusual resistance during the process of stowing the sample. As the rover team expressed in a tweet on Friday, the upshot is the debris is preventing the rover's robotic arm from properly handing off the sample-filled tube for sealing and storage. .

The rover team commanded the machine to backtrack by pulling out the drill bit and tube.

"These most recent downlinked images confirm that inside the bit carousel there are a few pieces of pebble-sized debris," Jandura wrote.