NASAs Curiosity rover has left plenty of marks on Mars over the previous nine-plus years, and the Red Planet is returning the favor.The rugged landscape inside Mars Gale Crater has actually taken some significant bites out of Curiositys 6 aluminum wheels, as CNET recently pointed out.” The current forecasted odometry staying is expected to be enough to support Curiosity throughout the rest of the mission,” Andrew Good, a spokesperson for NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which handles Curiositys mission, informed Space.com by means of email.The gouges and gashes on the rovers wheels “constantly look nastier than they are,” Good added.Related: Amazing Mars images by NASAs Curiosity roverAnother MAHLI image of Curiositys wheels taken on Jan. 27, 2022. The rovers wheels began revealing signs of wear and tear relatively early in the mission, stimulating its handlers to take some mitigation measures– picking routes across gentler surface when possible, for example, and eventually beaming up “traction control” software application that changes Curiositys speed depending on the type of ground its traversing.Those procedures seem to have actually worked, Good stated, noting that the mission group just recently began snapping wheel-inspection images every 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) of ground took a trip rather than every 1,650 feet (500 m), as had actually been the norm.Curiositys wheel-wear experiences helped shape the style of NASAs next Mars rover, Perseverance, which touched down on the floor of Jezero Crater in February 2021.
