Los Angeles: The Mars rover Curiosity is sidelined again, further delaying the restart of science experiments, after recovering from a computer problem.
The latest complication occurred over the weekend when the six-wheel rover entered safe mode after experiencing a software file error.
Curiosity remained in contact with ground controllers, but it can't zap rocks, snap pictures or roam around until the problem is fixed. Rover team members had expected to resume activities Monday, but they now have to wait a bit longer - perhaps until the end of the week.
We would definitely like to get over this and get back to doing something, said project manager Richard Cook of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which operates the $2.5 billion mission.
More trouble for the Mars Curiosity Rover which has just about recovered from a computer glitch that forced scientists to switch to its backup computer while they repaired some corrupted files.
The Rover now finds itself in the path of a solar flare that could potentially cause radiation damage, reports Slashgear.
The rover which was just re-activated has been put back into safe mode until the solar flare passes, the report added. The rover is designed to withstand punishing space weather, but scientists are putting it to sleep in view of the recent computer trouble it just faced.
Nasa put out the following tweet on behalf of the rover:
https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity/status/309451459924221953
On Tuesday, scientists noticed a huge flare erupting from the sun that hurled a stream of radiation in Mars' direction. The solar burst also spawned a cloud of superheated gas that barreled toward the red planet at 2 million mph.
The Mars rover Curiosity drilled into the Martian surface for the first time as part of an effort to learn if the planet most like Earth in the solar system ever had conditions to support microbial life, NASA said on Saturday.
Pictures beamed back to Earth on Saturday showed a hole about 0.63 inches (1.6 cm) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) deep in a patch of fine-grained sedimentary bedrock that appears to have been in contact with water.
The drilling, which took place on Friday, produced a small pile of powder that will be fed into two onboard laboratory instruments to determine the rock's chemical makeup.
First drilling on Mars to collect a sample for science is a success, NASA posted on Twitter.
Engineers spent days preparing to use Curiosity's drill, including boring practice holes earlier in the week. Previous Mars probes have had tools to scrape and grind into rock, but never a drill to collect interior samples.
Washington: NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has completed its first use of a brush it carries to sweep dust off Martian rocks.
Nearing the end of a series of first-time uses of the rover's tools, Curiosity cleared dust away from a targeted patch on a flat Martian rock using the Dust Removal Tool, NASA said in a statement.
The tool is a motorised, wire-bristle brush designed to prepare selected rock surfaces for enhanced inspection by the rover's science instruments. It is built into the turret at the end of the rover's arm. In particular, the Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer and the Mars Hand Lens Imager, which share the turret with the brush and the rover's hammering drill, can gain information after dust removal that would not be accessible from a dust-blanketed rock.
San Fransisco: NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, dispatched to look for the chemical ingredients and environments for microbial life, has found traces of compounds containing carbon, an essential building block for life, scientists said on Monday.
Just finding carbon somewhere doesn't mean that it has anything to do with life, or the finding of a habitable environment, lead scientist John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology, told reporters at an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
If you have organic carbon and you don't have any water, you don't have a habitable environment, he said.
Washington: The Curiosity Mars rover has made a potentially explosive discovery, but NASA scientists are keeping it under wraps to double-check the spacecraft's calculations, RIA Novosti reported.
Chief mission scientist John Grotzinger told National Public Radio that the possible discovery, gleaned from a sample of Martian soil collected by the six-wheeled vehicle, will be one for the history books. It's looking really good, he said.
