After slippery conditions forced Curiosity to delay its route to a planned destination earlier this month, NASA has chartered a new way for the rover to get there.
According to Space.com, Curiosity is en route to a "geological contact" where it will investigate two particular types of bedrock in close proximity to one another. Curiosity will trek 72 of terrain up a 21-degree slope.
"Mars can be very deceptive," Chris Roumeliotis, Curiosity's lead rover driver at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a press release. "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."
During a period of about a week earlier this month, Curiosity's wheels slipped three out of four times when mission managers tried to drive it to the "geological contact." After reviewing data from both the Rover and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, mission managers were able to chart what appears to be a far less risky route.
"One factor the science team considers is how much time to spend reaching a particular target, when there are many others ahead," Ashwin Vasavada, a Curiosity project scientist at JPL, said in the release. "We used observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to identify an alternative site for investigating the geological contact in the Logan Pass area. It's a little mind-blowing to drive up a hill to a site we saw only in satellite images and then find it in front of us."
