The Mars Curiosity Rover Goes 'In' for Repairs and Takes a Detour

It's hard to pinpoint the Mars Curiosity rover's coolest superpower, but shooting lasers at Martian rocks to determine their chemical composition is certainly high up on the list.

But last year, a wrench was thrown into the Curiosity's proverbial spokes when rover's ChemCam—the instrument that performs these laser tests on geological samples—malfunctioned. The problem was with the laser rangefinder, and the hangup slowed down the process of studying collected samples ever since.

"Without this laser rangefinder, the ChemCam instrument was somewhat blind," said Roger Wiens, ChemCam principal investigator at Los Alamos, in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) statement released yesterday.

"The main laser that creates flashes of plasma when it analyzes rocks and soils up to 25 feet [7.6 meters] from the rover was not affected, but the laser analyses only work when the telescope projecting the laser light to the target is in focus," he explained.

In other words, the autofocusing element was not working, forcing JPL engineers to use try out several focal lengths in tandem, to get a better image of the Curiosity's samples.

But now, the months of laser blindness are finally over. On Thursday, Wiens and his team announced that they have repaired the ChemCam using a new software update, which automatically collates the images and laser analyses taken by the instrument. "We think we will actually have better quality images and analyses with this new software than the original," said Wiens.

This is just the latest successful repair made to Curiosity this year. In March, NASA announced that they had fixed a short circuit that had incapacitated the rover's ability to use its drilling arm. With no repair people handy on Mars, these kinds of repairs take a lot of creative problem-solving to implement, but if the last few months are any indication, the JPL team is rolling with the Martian punches very well.

That's good news, because the JPL also just announced that the Curiosity team has found an alternate route up Mount Sharp, the 5.5-kilometer-high mountain that the rover is currently ascending. The original path proved too slippery for the rover to safely handle, prompting its operators to stay put and plot out another path to the interesting geological boundaries.

"Mars can be very deceptive," said lead driver Chris Roumeliotis in a JPL statement. "We knew that polygonal sand ripples have caused Curiosity a lot of drive slip in the past, but there appeared to be terrain with rockier, more consolidated characteristics directly adjacent to these ripples. So we drove around the sand ripples onto what we expected to be firmer terrain that would give Curiosity better traction."

"Unfortunately, this terrain turned out to be unconsolidated material too, which definitely surprised us and Curiosity," Roumeliotis added. "We decided to go back to Jocko Butte, and, in parallel, work with the scientists to identify alternate routes."

It goes to show that despite all the preparation that goes into these interplanetary missions, researchers still have to be ready for surprises. Given how many Mars has thrown at Curiosity so far, it's impressive that the rover is still dutifully shooting lasers at rocks and driving up mountains nearly three years after it landed.