For 6 days, NASA’s Mars rover battled a rock
Curiosity found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place last month, but NASA says there’s no reason to worry about the intrepid Mars rover. On April 25, mission engineers remotely piloted the rotary percussive drill of its robotic arm in a Martian rock nicknamed Atacama. This is a relatively routine task for Curiosity, which collects the samples and then pulverizes them into powder for future chemical analysis on board.
But Atacama is not a small stone. The heavy 1.5-foot-wide geological formation is approximately six inches thick and weighs approximately 28.6 pounds. So NASA engineers were understandably a little worried when Curiosity attempted to retract its arm and then lifted the entire rock from the ground.
“Drilling has fractured or separated upper layers of rock in the past, but no rock has ever remained attached to the drill sleeve,” the agency explained in a recent review.
Although fun to imagine, the situation did not make NASA engineers laugh. The rover’s drill wouldn’t be much more useful if a giant rock were attached to it indefinitely. But even if the controllers could detach Atacama from the mobile, the force could damage the tool or the arm itself. Without these capabilities, Curiosity’s ongoing mission would be seriously threatened.
Mission specialists first tried the drilling version of “turning it off and on” by vibrating the tool. However, Atacama remained stubbornly stuck on Curiosity… for four more days. NASA then tried a new approach by reorienting the robotic arm and asking the drill to vibrate once more. Atacama managed to get rid of a little sand that time, but nothing else.
Two even more stressful days passed before NASA made a third attempt. The engineers tilted the drill slightly farther, then rotated and vibrated the tool while spinning its bit. The Curiosity team predicted that it might take several attempts to pull off the feat. But in this case, Atacama ultimately relented almost immediately. The nearly week-long ordeal culminated with the giant rock fracturing as it landed on Martian soil.
So far, NASA has not reported any lingering damage to the vehicle, meaning the rover is likely ready to continue exploring the Red Planet. As for Atacama, it seems the Martian rock has learned a valuable lesson: don’t mess with curiosity.
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