Space & Astronomy

NASA's Curiosity gets stuck for days when its drill gets jammed in rock

By T.K. Randall
May 9, 2026 ·  0 comments

Image: Curiosity Rover
Credit: (PD) NASA/JPL-Caltech via Wikimedia Commons Having been trundling around on the Martian surface for over 13 years, NASA's Curiosity rover is certainly no stranger to using its robotic arm to drill into interesting outcrops of rock.

When it attempted to extricate its robotic arm after drilling into a rock nicknamed 'Atacama' on April 25th, however, the space agency was surprised to find that it had picked the entire rock up off the ground instead of simply coming free like had happened every other time.

Keen to avoid damaging the drill arm, the mission team attempted to free it by vibrating the drill, but the rock remained surprisingly stubborn and refused to come loose.A few days later, on April 29th, the team made another attempt to free the robotic arm - this time by reorienting it first, then vibrating the drill again - but to no avail.

On May 1st they took things up another notch by having the rover perform a more varied series of moves - tilting, reorienting and vibrating the drill arm once more to try to free it.

Fortunately, this time it actually worked and the rock hit the ground, fracturing as it did so.

You can check out some images from the incident in the video below.


Source: NASA.gov | Comments (0)

Tags: Curiosity, Mars