NASA troubleshooting drill snag keeping Curiosity rover stuck in Mars crater

LOS ANGELES – Engineers are troubleshooting a snag on NASA's Curiosity that's preventing the rover from moving its robotic arm and driving to another spot on Mars, the space agency said Tuesday. The problem involves a motor in the rover's drill that is used to bore into rocks. Curiosity has been taking pictures and tracking the weather, but doing little else for the past two weeks. "We're keeping busy with using the other instruments on the rover while they do these tests," said Ashwin Vasavada, project scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission. The team gave a health update on Curiosity while discussing research findings at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.