The team in charge of the Curiosity rover recently had to find a new route to some interesting rocks that they wanted to study because the original path proved too difficult for the rover to safely traverse.
Scientists wanted the car-sized rover to examine a "geological contact" where two different rock units meet. When the rover attempted to move to the location, the robot's six wheels slipped too much during three of the four drives between May 7 and May 13, officials from NASA said.
"Mars can be very deceptive," says Chris Roumeliotis, Curiosity's lead rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"We knew that polygonal sand ripples have caused Curiosity a lot of drive slip in the past, but there appeared to be terrain with rockier, more consolidated characteristics directly adjacent to these ripples," Roumeliotis says. "So we drove around the sand ripples onto what we expected to be firmer terrain that would give Curiosity better traction. Unfortunately, this terrain turned out to be unconsolidated material too, which definitely surprised us and Curiosity."
So the rover team decided to map out a new route using images captured by both Curiosity and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006. The alternate path would allow Curiosity to examine similar contacts to the west.
In order to reach its destination, Curiosity climbed a hill and dealt with a 21-degree slope during a 72-foot drive last Thursday, bringing the rover close to the contact that the scientists on the rover team want to take a closer look at with various instruments onboard the rover.
This isn't the first time scientists have had to deal with slippage as the rover moved slowly across the surface, and it won't be the last. After all, when driving a car located on another planet, it isn't always easy to see the terrain and surface conditions as you move.
The geological contact they are looking to examine contains light-colored rocks similar to those that the rover has already studies near the mountain's base, as well as some darker material that is less familiar to the rover team.
Curiosity originally landed on Mars in August 2012 and has been exploring the base of Mount Sharp since September 2014. The main goal of the mission is to determine if Mars could have ever supported microbial life. Mission scientists have already confirmed that question after they discovered that there was once a lake and stream system on the planet billions of years ago.
