On Tuesday, March 3rd it was announced that the NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover had suffered a short circuit in it’s arm mechanism while conducting scientific tests in the Pahrump Hills region. Officials said that the rover would be immobilized while the rover underwent testing.

Today the agency announced that the rover would resume normal operations within a few days, although the short circuit persists and tests will be ongoing for some time.

Curiosity was collecting samples at Telegraph Peak in the Pahrump Hills and in the process of transferring samples between instruments when the arm stopped moving.

Communication with the rover indicated that a short circuit had triggered automatic fault-protection processes and forced the arm to stop moving.

When Curiosity froze, it was in the process of transferring rock powder to a automated laboratory on the rovers interior. The powder was descending into a sieve where the samples are portioned into the appropriate amounts for analysis.

Curiosity has remained immobilized since the short-circuit occurred and will likely remain that way for a few days longer while engineers perform further tests.

Scientific observations using instrument’s on the rover’s mast as well as environmental monitoring by Curiosities weather station have continued.

Managers of the Curiosity mission have announced however that the rover is expected to resume arm movements next week while analysis of the intermittent short circuit continues.

“Diagnostic testing this week has been productive in narrowing the possible sources of the transient short circuit. The most likely cause is an intermittent short in the percussion mechanism of the drill. After further analysis to confirm that diagnosis, we will be analyzing how to adjust for that in future drilling,” said Curiosity Project Manager Jim Erickson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California in a statement.

The sample-collection drill on the rover uses hammering as well as rotational movement to penetrate the Martian rock. It then collects the broken rock and delivers it to analytical instruments.

On Thursday, March 5 engineers received results that used the same action that had previously caused the short. Another short occurred, lasting one one-hundredth of a second on the third of 180 up and down actions with the arm mechanism.

Although the short-circuit was small it was enough to trigger the built in fault protection software that had occurred previously.

The team plans to conduct further testing on the mechanism before allowing the rover to resume its previous operations. After that testing is complete, the Curiosity team plans to finish analyzing the rock sample collected on February 24.

The current drilling site was selected when researchers found that it appeared to be enriched with higher levels of silicon at the site.

“When you graph the ratios of silica to magnesium and silica to aluminum, ‘Telegraph Peak’ is toward the end of the range we’ve seen. It’s what you would expect if there has been some acidic leaching. We want to see what minerals are present where we found this chemistry,” said Curiosity co-investigator Doug Ming, of NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston.

After that analysis is complete and barring any further problems, Curiosity will continue through a narrow valley dubbed “Artists Drive” as it continues to climb to higher levels of Mount Sharp.