NASA's Curiosity Rover Had a Martian Rock Stuck on Its Arm for Days. Watch It Finally Shake the Stubborn Stone Off
Key takeaways
- NASA / JPL-Caltech NASA’s Curiosity rover has been roaming Mars for nearly 14 years, hunting for signs that it once hosted environments that could have allowed ancient microbes to thrive.
- On that day, Curiosity drilled into a flattish rock about 1.5 feet wide and 6 inches thick that weighed roughly 28.6 pounds.
- While pulling its drill out the rock, the rover accidentally yanked the whole chunk out of the ground, according to a NASA statement.
NASA / JPL-Caltech NASA’s Curiosity rover has been roaming Mars for nearly 14 years, hunting for signs that it once hosted environments that could have allowed ancient microbes to thrive. But on April 25, the rover ran into a problem: Its robotic arm got stuck while sampling a stone.
On that day, Curiosity drilled into a flattish rock about 1.5 feet wide and 6 inches thick that weighed roughly 28.6 pounds. It’s dubbed “Atacama” after a Chilean desert, the driest mid-latitude desert on Earth—a tough place to survive.
“Like its namesake, the Atacama drill target on Mars presented a challenge to the Curiosity rover and to the rover team,” writes William Farrand, a geoscientist at the Space Science Institute who works on Curiosity, in a NASA blog post.