Mars Emergency: How NASA Engineers Remotely Unstuck Curiosity’s Drill Bit
Here's a small little reminder that space exploration is still full of messy, unexpected surprises. A sample rock nicknamed Atacama clung to the Curiosity rover’s drill for days before the Mars robot finally shook it free, giving its mission handlers yet another test of patience and improvisation.
Late last month, Curiosity drilled into Atacama, a rock about 1.5 feet across at its base, 6 inches thick, and roughly 28.6 pounds. When the rover retracted its arm, the rock unfortunately came up with it, suspended by the fixed sleeve around the rotating drill bit, which is likely a first so far for human space exploration.
This incident is totally meme-ready, but let's not forget the purpose of the sample collection. Curiosity’s 6-pound drill is meant to collect and store Martian rock samples for analysis, and it's a crucial piece in aiding scientists reconstruct whether ancient Mars could once have supported life. Every drilling target matters as each sample is part of a larger attempt to read the planet’s geological record layer by layer. In that sense, the stuck rock was both a nuisance and a data point (that broke, no less).
And yet, Curiosity and its team will keep plugging along, which is pretty much how the craft's story has gone so far. The rover landed on Mars in 2012 and has spent 13 years exploring the planet’s surface, surviving problems such as severe wheel damage caused by sharp terrain (solved with innovative wheel-driving tactics), drill system stalls, and computer memory faults (fixed via creative rerouting and/or software workarounds). Curiosity's original mission length was two years, but thanks to its robustness and ingenuity of its team back home, it will continue indefinitely.
Photo credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
