One door closes, another one opens for Curiosity
Unscheduled stop brings unexpected science return
For NASA’s stalwart Mars rover, Curiosity, every lemon is a chance to make lemonade.
Writing in the official Curiosity rover blog (https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission-updates/), Catherine O'Connell-Cooper, planetary geologist at University of New Brunswick, notes that one of Curiosity’s daily drives, on 5 May, was terminated by the rover’s onboard driving software. After moving forward just half a metre, the rover’s sensors registered unexpectedly difficult terrain at its current location on the lower slopes of Mont Mercou. Although the name mission planners have bestowed on the feature flatters to deceive - it is not a mountain at all, but an outcropping of rock around 6 metres in height - the surface in its vicinity is rocky and uneven, and presents considerable challenges for Curiosity, whose metal wheels already bear countless scratches and tears from almost a decade of exploring the Martian surface.
Under such conditions as Curiosity encountered on 5 May, the rover is programmed to automatically come to a halt in order to await further instructions from Earth. Nearby was ‘Gourdon’, a broken rock that Curiosity had driven over earlier, and which had been photographed previously by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). However, the unanticipated slight change in the rover’s position, combined with the unexpected layover, allowed mission planners to investigate the rock with the Mastcam multispectral imager and Chemistry and Camera Complex (ChemCam). Curiosity continues to explore Gale crater.