NASA’s Curiosity rover got stuck on a rock. Here’s how they edited it

While it may It enabled many exciting discoveries, and Curiosity rover She also faced her share of setbacks. Last left NASA The engineers are speechless.

On April 25, Curiosity drilled into a rock called Atacama to collect a sample. When the rover retracted the robotic arm after drilling, the entire rock unexpectedly rose from the surface of Mars, weighing 28.6 pounds. While other drilling operations by Curiosity have caused cracks or breaks in the upper layers of Martian rock during the rover’s nearly 14-year mission, this is the first time someone has been stuck in the casing surrounding the rotating tip of the drill.

Like the space agency itself He narratesIt was Black and white obstacle detection cameras It was attached to the front of the rover’s hull and captured this bizarre “accident” in a series of images that allowed engineers to work immediately to free it, moving its robotic arm and operating the drill repeatedly over several days.

Engineers initially tried to remove the rocks by vibrating the drill, but to no avail. On April 29, they adjusted the position of the robotic arm and tried to vibrate again, but they were only able to remove some sand from the rock. On May 1, the team made another attempt by tilting the drill further, rotating and vibrating it, and rotating the drill bit. The team expected to have to repeat these operations several times, but instead the rock broke on the first try, shattering into several pieces when it hit the Martian soil.

NASA’s Curiosity rover was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and landed on Mars in August 2012 with the goal of searching for evidence that the Red Planet may have had conditions that could support microbial life. In 2020, it conducted an experiment in Glen Torridon within Gale Crater, an area rich in clay minerals that strongly indicate the presence of water in the past and which were collected using on-board instruments known as Mars Sample Analysis.

This story originally appeared on Wired Italy It was translated from Italian.