NASA troubleshooting problem with Mars
rover drill
Send a link to a friend
[December 14, 2016]
By Irene Klotz
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover
Curiosity has halted its trek up a mountain filled with potentially
habitable niches for life while engineers troubleshoot a problem with
one of its key instruments, scientists said on Tuesday.
Curiosity landed on Mars four years ago to determine if the planet most
like Earth in the solar system ever had the ingredients for life. To
answer the question, Curiosity has been drilling into rocks and
chemically analyzing the samples.
Drilling operations have been suspended however due to a suspected
problem with the instrument's motor, project scientist with NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory Ashwin Vasavada told reporters at the American
Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
The problem first appeared about a week ago, Vasavada said. Project
engineers thought they had resolved it, but the problems cropped back
up, he said.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2016/Dec/14/images/ads/current/bonanzasteak_sda_112014.png)
"If we can't move the drill bit down, there's no drilling," Vasavada
said. "There isn't any way to sugar-coat that one."
The problem comes as scientists are beginning to glimpse a history of
Mars replete with life-friendly, water-rich environments and intriguing
chemistry, including the first detection of the element boron.
Scientists believe boron may have led to the formation of the sugar
ribose and ribonucleic acid, or RNA, which is present in all living
cells on Earth.
The concentrations of boron are increasing as Curiosity ascends Mount
Sharp, a 3-mile (5-km) mound of sediment rising from the floor of Gale
Crater, where the rover made a daring sky crane-landing in August 2012.
[to top of second column] |
![](../images/121416pics/news_L19.jpg)
NASA's Curiosity Mars
rover is seen at the site from which it reached down to drill into a
rock target called 'Buckskin' on lower Mount Sharp in this low-angle
self-portrait taken August 5, 2015 and released August 19, 2015.
REUTERS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Handout
![](../images/ads/current/richardson_lda_090916.png)
Scientists have learned that the crater was filled with water
several times in its history.
Curiosity is currently in an area known as the Murray Formation,
located about 656 feet (200 meters) above where the rover landed.
That span represents tens of millions to hundreds of millions of
years of geologic time, said California Institute of Technology
geologist John Grotzinger.
"It turns out that this Murray Formation is really sort of a bonanza
of all the things we intended to study when we picked the landing
site," Grotzinger said.
"We see all of the properties in place that we like to associate
with habitability. There's actually nothing really extreme here, for
the most part, so this is all very good for habitability over very
long periods of time," he added.
(Reporting by Irene Klotz in San Francisco; Editing by Curtis
Skinner)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2016/Dec/14/images/ads/current/napa_bch1-3108.png) |