Curiosity Mars rover heads to disabled list with arm injury

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover suffered an injury while collecting samples at ‘Telegraph Peak’. While in the process of transferring sample material between analyzing instruments on the rover the arm stopped moving.

According to NASA, the rover will now be immobilized for several days while engineers perform an analysis to determine what cause the problem.

Initial communication from Curiosity indicated that a short circuit had occurred and, as it had been programmed to, the rover aborted the activity which was underway at the time.

“We are running tests on the vehicle in its present configuration before we move the arm or drive. This gives us the best opportunity to determine where the short is,” said Curiosity Project Manager Jim Erickson, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California in a statement.

According to the agency, a transient short circuit in some systems would have little impact on Curiosity’s day to day operations. However, in other systems it could force the team to restrict the activities of the rover.

The problem occurred as Curiosity was transferring rock powder collected by the drill on its arm to a laboratory instrument inside the rover. The rock power was descending into a chamber that sieves and portions the sample. This same process has been done successfully on five previous occasions in 2013 and 2014, however on a dusty world 140 million miles away a lot can go wrong with your remote control vehicle in a short time.

Curiosity drilled into the Telegraph Peak site on February 24. The site was selected after NASA researchers discussed the physical and chemical measurements. The site, in the Pahrump Hills region, appeared to be enriched with large amounts of silicon in proportion to aluminum and magnesium.

“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.

The rover has been in the Pahrump Hills region, an outcrop at the base of Mount Sharp, for five months. Curiosity’s extended mission is to examine layers on the mountain which researchers believe will hold geological and chemical records of wet periods in Martian history as well as possible information on why those wet periods ended.

The next step in the mission was to drive away from Pahrump Hills through “Artist’s Drive”, a narrow valley in the hills and then up to a higher level in the basal layer of Mount Sharp. Those plans are now temporarily put on hold while engineers conduct diagnostic testing.

Any serious damage to Curiosity could be bad news for Mars exploration. The long-lived Opportunity rover does not appear to be in NASA’s budget for 2016 and the next rover mission is not scheduled to launch until 2020.

The loss of the Curiosity rover could mean that there is no new information coming from the ground on Mars for five years.

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