NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity may have to choose a new route to the base of a huge Red Planet mountain.
The 1-ton Curiosity rover had been heading for Mount Sharp — a 3.4-mile-high (5.5 kilometers) mountain in the center of Mars’ Gale Crater — via “Hidden Valley,” a sandy swale that’s about the length of a football field. But Curiosity turned back shortly after entering the valley’s northeastern end earlier this month, finding the sand surprisingly slippery, NASA officials said.
“We need to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the wheels and Martian sand ripples, and Hidden Valley is not a good location for experimenting,” Curiosity project manager Jim Erickson, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.