It’s a massive assignment to get a rover to the surface of Mars, so NASA designs its robots to closing for at least multiple months. Luckily, most of them operate for lots longer. Opportunity changed into these days declared lost after 15 years on the red planet. Curiosity continues to be going sturdy after more than six years, but there has been a chunk of a scare earlier this month. NASA says it has demonstrated the rover is completely operational, and it’s resuming technological know-how operations.
Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and commenced exploring Gale crater. By 2014, it changed into hiking the slopes of Mount Sharp to get a higher idea of the planet’s geological records. The rover has encountered a few bumps alongside the manner, consisting of earlier this month while it did not boot up efficiently. This sent Curiosity into secure mode as NASA evaluated its circumstance.
NASA announced on February twenty-second that it had brought Curiosity out of safe mode, successfully finishing the bootup series 30 instances. However, it wasn’t equipped to hold with the project simply but. This wasn’t the first computer blunders to hit Curiosity. Last year, the rover’s pc was given caught in a boot loop, forcing NASA to turn to the backup machine. Luckily, the rover was designed with two same computer systems for just this purpose.
Naturally, NASA treats any ability sign of machine failure on the rover as a critical be counted. There’s no manner to switch additives or maybe provide it a very good healing kick from tens of millions of miles away. The company opted to accumulate extra data on the fault earlier than resuming the challenge.
We nonetheless don’t know precisely what brought about the failed boot-up series on February 15th. NASA’s update says that every one structure are operating commonly, and the rover hasn’t skilled any similar problems all through trying out. Engineers are still analyzing the incident, but NASA is now comfortable returning Curiosity to full operational popularity.
Curiosity is currently studying a region referred to as Glen Torridon, which orbital observations have discovered to be wealthy in clay minerals. Clay normally bureaucracy in the presence of water, which is of super interest to the technology team. Curiosity is ideally suited to studying the geology of clay deposits. The subsequent rover, currently handiest known as Mars 2020, will awareness on searching for signs of lifestyles at the pink planet.
