NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Starts Analyzing Drilled Rocks After Year-Long Break

After more than a year, NASA's Curiosity rover has successfully delivered rock powder extracted from the Martian surface to one of its two onboard labs, regaining the critical ability to analyze surface samples on the red planet. The deployment of the lab on May 31 marks a major milestone for the agency, which has worked extremely hard to fix Curiosity's drilling and sample analysis capabilities. The technology-rigged rover's original drilling mechanism suffered a number of issues in 2016 and lost its upward and downward movement by the end of that year. The problem kept the robotic vehicle from extracting and analyzing Martian rock samples and severely affected the mission. However, the team of scientists at NASA worked on a percussive method called feed extended drilling, wherein the force of rover's extended robotic arm is used to push the drill forward into the rock in a freestyle manner. On May 20, the method worked as the agency expected and Curiosity was able to drill into a rock named Duluth.