NASA Mars Curiosity Rover Climbs a Hill to Investigate New Geological Features

NASA's Mars Rover, Curiosity, is continuing its trek across Mars. On last Thursday, it climbed a hill to approach a site for investigating a geological boundary, after a comparable site was too hard to reach.

The rover had to drive about 72 feet up slopes as steep as 21 degrees to a target area where two distinctive types of bedrock meet. Researchers wanted to examine an outcrop that contained the contact between pale rock that they examined lower on Mount Sharp and a darker, bedded rock unit that they have yet to examine up close.

"Mars can be very deceptive," said Chris Roumeliotis, Curiosity's lead rover driver, in a news release. "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. 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 Curioisity."

In three out of four drives, Curiosity experienced wheel slippage in excess of the limit set for the drive. This caused it to stop mid-drive for safety. That's when researchers realized they needed to go to another site.

The rover drove back to Jocko Butte and the researchers worked to identify alternative routes.

"One factor the science team considers is how much time to spend reaching a particular target, when there are many others ahead," said Ashwin Vasavada, one of the researchers. "We used observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to identify an alternative site for investigating the geological contact in the Logan Pass area. It's a little mind-blowing to drive up a hill to a site we saw only in satellite images and then find it in front of us."

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