NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found a new route to some interesting rocks after its original path proved too difficult to traverse.
Scientists want the car-size Curiosity rover to check out a "geological contact" where two different rock units meet. Curiosity tried to reach such a contact earlier this month, but the robot's six wheels slipped too much during three out of four drives between May 7 and May 13, NASA officials said.
"Mars can be very deceptive," Chris Roumeliotis, Curiosity's lead rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.
"We knew that polygonal sand ripples have caused Curiosity a lot of drive slip in the past, but there appeared to be terrain with rockier, more consolidated characteristics directly adjacent to these ripples," Roumeliotis added. "So we drove around the sand ripples onto what we expected to be firmer terrain that would give Curiosity better traction. Unfortunately, this terrain turned out to be unconsolidated material too, which definitely surprised us and Curiosity." Read more...
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