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For 6 days, NASA’s Mars rover battled a rock

Popular Science·Andrew Paul·25 days ago
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#page#nasa#curiosity#rock#atacama#drill
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The multi-day challenge took multiple attempts to fix. Credit: NASA Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Curiosity got itself stuck between a rock and hard place last month, but NASA says there’s no reason to fret about the intrepid Mars rover . On April 25, mission engineers were remotely piloting its robotic arm’s rotary-percussive drill into a Martian rock nicknamed Atacama. It’s a relatively routine task for Curiosity, which takes the samples and then pulverizes them into a powder for future onboard chemical analysis. But Atacama is no small stone. The hefty, 1.5-foot-wide geologic formation is about six inches thick and weighs about 28.6 pounds. So NASA engineers were understandably a bit worried when Curiosity attempted to retract its arm—and subsequently lifted the entire rock off the ground.…

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