NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars is finally mobile again after September slowdown

On top of completing two weeks of science operations, NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars has also completed its longest drive since suffering a memory setback in September this year. With this last trip, the Mars rover’s total distance travelled was pushed to 20 kilometres. On Tuesday, Curiosity took a short drive (also called a bump) to explore a Lake Orcadie on Mars’s Vera Rubin Ridge, where the rover has been before. Once there, Curiosity will dig into grey coloured rocks at this site to collect and study samples of the lakebed’s composition. Curiosity made a 60-metre trip to the familiar site on Tuesday, marking the rover officially resuming exploration on Mars. “With this latest drive, the mission is back to business. The team plans to drill a new target later this week,” NASA said in a recent statement. Curiosity is currently relying on its Side A computers, while Side B is nursed back to be fully functional. The switch will enable engineers to conduct a detailed diagnosis of a technical issue that has prevented the rover’s active computer (Side B) from storing scientific and some key engineering data since 15 September, NASA said. [caption id=“attachment_5518881” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] The Curiosity rover’s dusty self-portrait after the Mars dust storm cleared in September. Image courtesy: NASA[/caption] The process of troubleshooting could take a long time, to gather information on the cause and workarounds for the memory anomaly on Side B. In the meanwhile, the computer swap has allowed science data and records to be stored in Side A’s memory. “We’re confident we’ll be getting back to full operations, but it’s too early to say how soon,” Steven Lee, the Curiosity mission deputy project manager was quoted to have said. “We spent the last week checking out Side A and preparing it for the swap,” Lee said. “It’s certainly possible to run the mission on the Side A computer if we really need to. But our plan is to switch back to Side B as soon as we can fix the problem to utilise its larger memory size.” Since those previous attempts, the mission team has worked on better drilling technique and successfully tested them on other drilling sites on Mars. The rover will also be playing it smart this time around — scratching the bedrock’s surface using the rover’s dust-removal tools to check for softer, more drillable rocks than the last attempt.