10 Years Since its Touchdown, NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Still Going Strong – What Has Been Learnt?

Curiosity, NASA’s car-sized Mars rover, is all ready to answer major questions related to its travel, including when it landed on Mars 10 years ago: is there any ancient life on the Red Planet? According to scientists, the answer to all these questions is yes, and they have been continuously trying to understand more about the habitable environment on the planet in the past.

Curiosity has traveled around 29 kilometers (18 miles) and ascended 625 meters (2,050 feet) over the last decade while exploring the Gale Crater and the foothills of Mount Sharp within it. This Mars rover has explored samples of soil along with 42 rocks, depending on a suite of scientific instruments that help to further learn about the Earth’s rocky sibling. The success of this analysis encouraged a team of engineers at NASA to contrive methods to reduce the chances of damage and keep it rolling. Recently, Curiosity’s Mars mission was extended for the next 3 years, which allows it to continue among NASA’s fleet of important astrobiological endeavors.

The Mars rover has explored the Red Planet and learned about its skies, capturing images of drifting moons and shining clouds. The radiation sensor included in this rover has helped scientists to understand how to keep astronauts safe in the future by determining the amount of high-energy radiation they would be exposed to on the planet’s surface.

However, Curiosity has been able to find water on the planet along with chemical building blocks as well as nutrients that are essential to survive in that atmosphere. These elements detected in the Gale Crater have existed for at least tens of millions of years. Once, the Gale Crater held a lake, as its size then waned and waxed over time. This eventually indicates that every layer higher up on Mount Sharp works as a record of the current environmental conditions on the planet.

Currently, the intrepid Mars rover travels through a canyon, making a record of the transition to a new region.

Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, said that it could be seen that there were some dramatic changes in the ancient Martian environment. “The question now is whether the habitable conditions that Curiosity has found have persisted through these changes. Did they disappear, never to return, or did they come and go over millions of years?”

NASA’s Curiosity has shown remarkable progress up the mountain. In 2015, scientists successfully captured a postcard” image of distant buttes.

How to Keep a Rover on a Roll

A team of hundreds of dedicated engineers has been continuously working on maintaining this rover after being active on missions for ten years now. This team of engineers worked both in person at the JPL as well as remotely from their homes just to keep the rover on a roll.

These engineers look after every crack in the wheels; they re-test every single line of computer code before launching it.

Andy Mishkin, Curiosity’s acting project manager at JPL, said, “As soon as you land on Mars, everything you do is based on the fact that there’s no one around to repair it for 100 million miles. It’s all about making intelligent use of what’s already on your rover.”

Curiosity’s robotic drilling process, for example, has been reconstructed a number of times since its landing on Mars. At some point, the drill was not in service for over a year as a team of engineers made it more like a handheld drill by redesigning its use. In recent times, a set of braking mechanisms on the rover stopped functioning as its purpose is to let the robotic arm stay in place or move accordingly. However, since the team included a set of spares, the arm has been working as usual.

A team of engineers is considering treacherous spots like the knife-edged “gator-back” terrain they discovered recently to lower the chances of damage to the wheels. They additionally introduced a traction-control algorithm to help.

Engineers have been considering a similar methodology to manage the rover’s slowly waning power. According to Mishkin, the team of engineers has continued to calculate the energy used by the rover on a daily basis. They also found out about activities that can be executed parallelly to boost the available energy to the rover.

Undoubtedly, Curiosity is carrying out multiple tasks simultaneously as it is safe to do so, Miskin added.

Through these kinds of engineering hacks and careful planning, the team expected the rover to function for many years.