NASA’s Curiosity Rover Finds Its Drilling in Rock. Here’s How They Released It

Even so contributed to many interesting discoveries, and Curiosity Rover he has also faced obstacles. Latest on the left NASA the engineer was speechless.

On April 25, Chidwi drilled a rock called “Atacama” to take a sample. After the spacecraft retracted the robotic arm after drilling, all of the rock unexpectedly lifted off the Martian surface—all 28.6 pounds. While other Curiosity rover drilling has caused cracks or fractures in the surface of Martian rocks for about 14 years, this is the first time that a human has not been attached to the arm rotating the rotating tip of the drill.

Like the space agency itself he saysit was black and white obstacle detection cameras he rode in front of the vehicle that filmed this mysterious “accident” in a series of images that allowed engineers to work immediately to free it, move its robot arm and drive the drill repeatedly for several days.

Experts initially tried to remove the stone by vibrating the drill, but to no avail. On April 29, he changed the shape of the robot’s arm and tried to swing it again, but it was only able to drop sand on the rock. On May 1, the team again tried tilting the drill a bit more, spinning and rocking it, and rotating the drill. The team expected to have to repeat this process several times, but instead the rock broke on the first trip, and broke into many pieces when it hit the Martian soil.

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 have had conditions that could support the life of microbes. In 2020, it carried out a test in the Glen Torridon area inside Gale Crater, an area that contains a lot of clay minerals that indicate the presence of water in the past and that it collected using the ground instrument known as Sample Analysis on Mars.

This article appeared first THE WIRE Italy and translated from Italian.