NASA’s Curiosity Rover Got Its Drill Stuck on a Rock. Here’s How They Freed It
Although he has allowed for many exciting discoveries, the Curiosity Rover also encountered its share of setbacks. The latter left NASA engineers speechless.
On April 25, Curiosity drilled into a rock nicknamed “Atacama” to collect a sample. When the rover retracted the robotic arm after drilling, the entire rock unexpectedly lifted off the Martian surface, its 28.6 pounds. While other Curiosity drilling operations have caused cracks or breaks in the upper layers of Martian rocks during the rover’s nearly 14-year mission, this is the first time one has stuck to the sleeve that surrounds the rover’s rotating tip.
As the space agency itself recounts, it was the black-and-white obstacle-detection cameras installed on the front of the rover’s chassis that captured this strange “accident” in a sequence of images that allowed engineers to immediately get to work freeing it, moving its robotic arm and operating the drill repeatedly over several days.
Engineers first tried to remove the rock by vibrating the drill, to no avail. On April 29, they adjusted the position of the robotic arm and tried the vibrations again, but only succeeded in causing some sand to fall from the rock. On May 1, the team tried again by tilting the drill more, rotating and vibrating it, and rotating the bit. The team expected to have to repeat these operations several times, but the rock came loose on the first attempt, breaking into a multitude of pieces when it hit the Martian ground.
NASA’s Curiosity rover was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and landed on Mars in August 2012 with the aim of searching for evidence that the Red Planet may once have had conditions suitable for microbial life. In 2020, she conducted an experiment in the Glen Torridon region within Gale Crater, an area rich in clay minerals that strongly indicate the presence of water in the past and which she collected using onboard instruments known as Mars Sample Analysis.
This story was originally published in CABLE Italy and was translated from Italian.
