Curiosity manipulator can continue to work next week.

Due to short circuits, some limitations in future operations are likely.

Photo dated March 4, 2015 at the position where the rover was forced to stand for several days. NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Members of the Curiosity team report on the possible inclusion of a device’s hand-manipulator after short circuits next week. Problem analysis will continue.

Career "Curiositi" more than a week is under threat: problems with the manipulator began in late February. The system of protection against short circuits has turned off the rover during the processing of rock samples on February 27 of this year for 911 Sol missions. The device automatically stopped its work and requested further instructions from the Earth. Since then, the rover team has avoided the movement of the device itself and its robo-arms, while the engineers have concentrated on diagnostic tests. Research continued with the help of head-mast equipment and a weather station.

This week, the search attempts were crowned with success: now the specialists of the Nazi Jet Propulsion Laboratory believe that the most likely cause of the malfunction was a short circuit in the percussion mechanism of the drill on the rover manipulator. The tools on the Curiosity manipulator gnaw into stones on the surface of Mars using both the rotation of the drill and the shock movements. Then the crushed samples are collected and analyzed inside the rover.
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The closure on February 27 occurred during the extraction of a crumb of a stone and its transfer to a mechanism that eliminates and measures the crushed powder. At the moment of KZ, the percussion mechanism worked, shaking off the drill from the rock sample. This Tuesday, March 5, the engineers received the test results: the closure occurred again during the third of 180 repetitions of that movement. The length of the jump was less than a hundredth of a second, but this was enough to re-trigger the protection system.


Device hand-manipulator rover "Curiosity". NASA / JPL-Caltech

The next actions of the engineers will be further testing of the “Curiosity” systems with other manipulator positions, then the sample in the robot arm will be transferred to the laboratory installation inside the rover for analysis. After these operations, the rover will continue to climb Sharpe Mountain . The movements of the manipulator are possible as early as next week.

Analysis of the state of the rover will clarify how to use the installation for future drilling. The coil in which the short circuit occurred can be turned off , and in this case, for further work, you will have to choose softer rock samples. Find such in the current study area is easy, says the head of the project "Curiosity" Jim Erickson. It is possible that the impact mechanism will continue to be used if the current surges are not so large. Ultimately, the Curiosity functionality may suffer, but this is better than completely losing the apparatus of the 2.5 billion space program.

Curiosity is a third-generation mars rover used as part of NASA's Mars Science Program. The device was launched on November 26, 2011 and landed on the surface of the red planet on August 6, 2012. One of the goals of the expedition is to search for possible traces of life on Mars.