NASA Hacked a Fix for Mars Rover's Broken Drill

After suffering for more than a year from a broken exercise, NASA's 5-year-old Curiosity rover collects and analyzes samples once again.

The drill is at the end of Curiosity's LeBron James size robotic arm and is essential for capturing and depositing dirt in the spaceship's embedded lab. Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) spent several months trying to drill a new way of drilling after the rover tool was destroyed in December 2016.

Drill Baby Drill
After testing Their techniques on Earth, the engineers saw that their solution also worked on Mars when they penetrated of a few centimeters in a rock of the Red Planet named "Ducul" in May.

Engineers call the new technique "extended drilling". drill a few inches beyond the stabilizer bars that keep the mobile stable. NASA says the new technique works more like a human squeezing a wall to stabilize itself while they work.

On Monday, the space agency announced that they would also succeed in getting this sample in the rover labs for analysis – a huge challenge in itself. The arm of the rover dropped "half of a sample baby aspirin" into two entrances. Curiosity will start doing rock chemistry experiments this week

Work in Progress
But this hacking also makes it harder to say how many samples are left for analysis. Engineers are waiting to perfect the method while continuing to climb and study Mount Sharp.

"The scientific team was confident that the engineers would deliver – so confident that we were going back to a site we had missed before," said JPL project scientist Curiosity Ashwin Vasavada. "The gambit paid, and we now have a key sample that we could never have had. "

This article was posted on discovermagazine.com

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