Curiosity Rover photographed a flat object whose mission members initially thought it was a broken part of the enormous robot. NASA called the object later Pettegrove Point Foreign Object Debris or PPFOD (Pettegrove Point is a section of Vera Rubin Ridge, the landform Curiosity has been investigated the last 11 months or so.)
READ ALSO | OPossibly Rover still unreachable if the Mars dust storm continues, says NASA
Soon Rover's observation revealed that the object is not strange at all. "It turned out to be a very thin piece of rock, so we can all sleep peacefully tonight, but curiosity has not yet begun to lose its skin!" mission member Brittney Cooper, an atmospheric scientist based at York University in Toronto, wrote in an update on Thursday.
"Perhaps the target should have been renamed to match the theme of the current quadrilateral that includes curiosity:" Rabhadh Cear "&" False alarm "in Scottish Gaelic, & # 39; she added.
Curiosity recently drilled a Pettegrove Point rock called Stoer and the rover has started analyzing the snagged samples, Cooper wrote in the update. The 1-ton rover has also recently measured the opaqueness of the Mars atmosphere and helped researchers to follow the global dust storm that has raged on the Red Planet for the past two months.
READ ALSO | Aditya-L1: the historical mission of India to study the sun
However, the storm of Opportunity Rover on Mars is already perishing, but there is still so much dust in the air that Rover can not get enough sunlight to recharge his batteries. Opportunity Rover has been silent since June 10 and NASA scientists think the long-lived robot has put itself in a short sleep mode.
Source link