NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover Successfully Resumes Test Drilling

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is for the first time testing an improvised new percussive drilling technique intended to pound subsurface samples into powder in hopes of better understanding the shallow Martian subsurface. After a year's drilling hiatus, Curiosity is again back to drilling samples in rocks at the surface of Mars' Gale Crater. This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the'Mojave' site, where its drill collected the mission's second taste of Mount Sharp. The scene combines dozens of images taken during January 2015 by the MAHLI camera at the... "If all goes well and we can continue drilling, the science team hopes to learn how the ancient climate at Gale crater, and the prospects for life there, changed over time," Ashwin Vasavada, the Curiosity Rover's project scientist, told me. Curiosity's drilling capability was knocked out of business in December 2016, when the motor that moves Curiosity's drill back and forth became unreliable, Vasavada told me.