NASA’s Curiosity Rover Got Its Drill Stuck on a Rock. Here’s How They Freed It

While it has enabled galore breathtaking discoveries, the Curiosity Rover has besides encountered its stock of setbacks. The latest near NASA engineers speechless.

On April 25, Curiosity drilled into a stone nicknamed “Atacama” to cod a sample. When the rover retracted the robotic limb aft drilling, the full stone unexpectedly lifted disconnected the Martian surface—all 28.6 pounds of it. While different Curiosity drilling operations person caused cracks oregon breaks successful the precocious layers of Martian rocks during the rover's astir 14-year mission, this is the archetypal clip 1 has remained stuck to the sleeve that surrounds the drill's rotating tip.

As the abstraction bureau itself recounts, it was the black-and-white obstacle-detection cameras mounted connected the beforehand of the rover's chassis that captured this peculiar “accident” successful a series of images that allowed engineers to get to enactment instantly to escaped it, moving its robotic limb and operating the drill repeatedly implicit respective days.

Engineers initially tried to region the stone by vibrating the drill, to nary avail. On April 29, they adjusted the presumption of the robotic limb and tried vibration again, but lone managed to sound immoderate soil disconnected the rock. On May 1, the squad gave it different effort by tilting the drill more, rotating and vibrating it, and spinning the drill bit. The squad expected to person to repetition these operations respective times, but alternatively the stone broke escaped connected the archetypal attempt, shattering into a multitude of pieces erstwhile it deed the Martian soil.

NASA’s Curiosity rover was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and landed connected Mars successful August 2012 with the intent of looking for grounds that the Red Planet mightiness person erstwhile had conditions that could enactment microbial life. In 2020, it conducted an experimentation successful the Glen Torridon portion wrong Gale Crater, an country affluent successful clay minerals that powerfully bespeak the beingness of h2o successful the past and that it collected utilizing onboard instruments known arsenic Sample Analysis connected Mars.

This communicative primitively appeared in WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.