Blocked wheel, modified trajectory, worn equipment… What we know about the difficulties encountered by the Curiosity robot on Mars

The galleys accumulate for Curiosity. The NASA rover has had to face several difficulties in recent days as it continues its road trip to the planet Mars, which began almost ten years ago. On April 13, Curiosity temporarily stuck one of its wheels – badly damaged – in a rock on the red planet. Enough to give a few cold sweats to the engineers who run the robot a few million kilometers away.

A temporarily locked wheel

On Wednesday April 13, the Curiosity robot quietly continued its journey on the red planet when one of its six wheels got stuck in a rock. A pebble in his shoe of which he was not so obvious to get rid of. “While the situation would be easy to resolve on Earth, it is more complex when navigators are 254 million kilometers away”Explain Thomas Appéré, doctor in planetology, on Twitter.

Fortunately, the teams in charge of piloting Curiosity in California succeeded in their maneuver to free the robot from this bad posture. “If there is no concern for the health and activity of the rover, it slowed our descent”reports planetary scientist Mark Salvatore on the NASA website (in English).

A detour due to rocks

This is not the first time that Curiosity has had to revise its route. At the beginning of April, NASA teams decided to take a detour after seeing “alligator” rocks on their way. No, it is not a trace of animal life on Mars, but “stones sharpened by the wind” at pace crocodile scales, according to NASA. An alternative route was finally found to avoid these stones while continuing to explore Mount Sharp, a mountain in the center of the Gale crater, notes Numerama.

More and more worn out equipment

These inconveniences are not really surprises for NASA. It must be said that Curiosity would no longer pass the technical control for a few years already. As early as 2017, the American space agency had alerted to the state of its rover. Two of its aluminum wheels about 50 cm in diameter and equipped with crampons had already been considerably damaged after several journeys on sharp rocks. At the beginning of 2022, new photos confirmed the sorry state of the robot.

Over the course of the discoveries, and the few kilometers traveled, the terrain crossed by Curiosity in the Gale crater turned out to be more dangerous than expected. “You have to imagine that it hasn’t rained for billions of years. The rocks are sculpted by the wind. (…) If they were on Earth, you shouldn’t walk on them, they could cut you the shoes !” warns William Rapin, researcher at the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology, with Numerama. Faced with this, humans have taken over daily control of Curiosity’s route in order to prevent the automatic pilot from driving into sharp areas… and to try to continue this Marsian road-trip until the end of the mission, scheduled for 2026.