Curiosity rover continues up Mt. Sharp despite tire damage

Despite significant tire damage, NASA’s Curiosity rover is expected to be able to complete its scientific mission on Mars, officials from the space agency said in a recent statement.

About the size of an SUV, Curiosity rides along on six aluminum wheels. While years of driving around the Red Planet have done significant damage to the wheels, the rover should be able to reach its goal of climbing Mount Sharp in search of signs that Mars could have hosted life.

“Cracks and punctures have been gradually accumulating at the pace we anticipated, based on testing we performed at JPL,” said Steve Lee, Curiosity’s control systems manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. “Given our longevity projections, I am confident these wheels will get us to the destinations on Mount Sharp that have been in our plans since before landing.”

Punctures to the wheels, which are about half as thick as a dime, first started appearing in 2013. NASA navigators then made the decision to roll over smoother terrain where possible. The space agency also began additional testing of its wheel technology.

Tests of Curiosity’s wheels back here on Earth showed they hit about 60 percent of their lifetime when three of their 19 treads, also known as grousers, have broken. Regular periodic photos of the wheels show none of the grousers have broken yet, and therefore, NASA officials said, the rover should be able to reach three locations on Mount Sharp that are crucial to its mission.

“At a current odometry of 7.9 miles since its August 2012 landing, Curiosity’s wheels are projected to have more than enough life remaining to investigate the hematite, clay and sulfate units ahead, even in the unlikely case that up to three grousers break soon,” NASA officials said. “The driving distance to the start of the sulfate-rich layers is roughly 4.7 miles from the rover’s current location.”

The sites targeted by the rover are either rich in sulfates, clay minerals or hematite, an iron-oxide mineral, geology that can deliver details on Mars’ past habitability. For instance, clay minerals typically form in liquid water with a near-neutral pH, and therefore might be good signs of past conditions that were ideal for life, mission researchers have said.

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Image credit: NASA

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