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NASA announced that its Curiosity rover had just completed a relatively long trip to Mars, earning an odometer of more than 12 miles. The rover is now located on Orcadie Lake on the Red Planet, a site where NASA previously tried to drill into the gray rock. The space agency expects convincing results this time thanks to the recently identified drilling sites and an improved drilling process.
The NASA Mars team had previously attempted to obtain rock samples using the Curiosity drill at sites named Lake Orcadie and Lake Orcadie 2. The rover instrument had failed to obtain sufficient samples for twice because he was unable to penetrate the bedrock sufficiently. More than 240 soils (March days) have passed since these attempts and researchers have had time to improve the drilling process.
In addition, NASA says its scientists have identified three potential new drilling sites on which a sample could be successfully exploited. The rover dust removal tool was used to scrape the bedrock at potential sites, allowing researchers to see where the surface is softer.
The space agency said Curiosity had made a 20-meter trip today to the potential site. Overall, NASA said the rover had traveled about 1 meter last weekend, the longest distance since the September memory anomaly. The NASA team had switched the rover to a computer nicknamed "Side-A" on October 3 to solve the problem.
NASA says its Curiosity mobile is "back to business" and the next drilling event will be around the end of the week. This is not to say that the mobile team ignores the problem of the B-side computer, however; The space agency has announced that it will continue to diagnose the problem.
The Curiosity team explained on the NASA Mars website that it had dedicated today to put the rover in the right place for the exercise. Scientists need images of areas captured by Curiosity to ensure that past drill debris has been washed away. The experts must conclude a final confirmatory analysis on the potential bedrock site to determine if drilling will take place before the end of next week.
Although Curiosity is back to work on its own mission, NASA's old robot Opportunity remains silent after the global dust storm of Mars. Although the storm began to subside several weeks ago, the space agency was not able to contact its second aircraft, which entered low-power mode during most of the storm.
Heavy clouds of dust had swept the sun, preventing the Opportunity rover from recharging its batteries with solar energy. The rover had been designed to deal with such a situation, but NASA had previously warned that an unforeseen problem might have definitely prevailed.
NASA, however, is not ready to give up Opportunity and says it's waiting to see if the next season of Mars winds will disperse the solar panels from the rover. Assuming that the dust prevents the batteries from recharging, the wind season may be essential to restore the rover to full power. If no contact is made in the coming months, NASA will reassess the rover's situation in January 2019 and issue an update at that time.
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