NASA's Curiosity rover tests new drilling method on Mars
Washington, May 24: After a mechanical problem took NASA Mars rover Curiosity's drill offline in December 2016, it has now successfully tested a new drilling method on the Red Planet, making a 50-millimetre deep hole in a target called "Duluth", NASA has said.
Engineers working with the Curiosity Mars rover have been hard at work testing a new way for the rover to drill rocks and extract powder from them.
On May 20, that effort produced the first drilled sample on Mars in more than a year, NASA said in a statement on Wednesday.
The new technique, called Feed Extended Drilling, keeps the drill's bit extended out past two stabiliser posts that were originally used to steady the drill against Martian rocks.
It lets Curiosity drill using the force of its robotic arm, a little more like the way a human would drill into a wall at home.
"The team used tremendous ingenuity to devise a new drilling technique and implement it on another planet," said Curiosity Deputy Project Manager Steve Lee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"Those are two vital inches of innovation from 60 million miles away. We're thrilled that the result was so successful," Lee said.
Drilling is a vitally important part of Curiosity's capabilities to study Mars.
Inside the rover are two laboratories that are able to conduct chemical and mineralogical analyses of rock and soil samples.
The samples are acquired from Gale Crater, which the rover has been exploring since 2012.
"We've been developing this new drilling technique for over a year, but our job isn't done once a sample has been collected on Mars," said JPL's Tom Green, a systems engineer who helped develop and test Curiosity's new drilling method.
"With each new test, we closely examine the data to look for improvements we can make and then head back to our test bed to iterate on the process."
There's also the next step to work on -- delivering the rock sample from the drill bit to the two laboratories inside the rover.
As soon as this Friday, the Curiosity team will test a new process for delivering samples into the rover's laboratories, NASA said.
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England sticking with Key, McCullum and Stokes despite Ashes humbling
London (AP): England is not sacking anybody following the 4-1 Ashes loss in Australia.
A review of the tour by the England and Wales Cricket Board, announced within hours of the final match in January, was concluded on Monday. Firing people would “be the easy thing to do,” ECB chief executive Richard Gould said but he insisted, "This is not the time to throw everything out."
Managing director Rob Key, coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes kept their jobs after the best England side to go to Australia in 14 years lost the Ashes in 11 days with two games to spare.
“Moving people on can sometimes be the easy thing to do. That's not the route that we're going to take,” Gould said. “I've seen the driving ambition and determination that we're lucky enough to have within our leadership group to take the lessons from the Ashes and move forward.”
Gould previously was the chief executive of Bristol City soccer club and said the ECB would not follow the same route as soccer's hire-and-fire culture.
“Cricket is a very unique sport in that it takes a team of leadership ... it's not like football where there's a single point of failure or success with a manager," he said. He added the ECB would not “select or deselect management based on a popularity campaign.”
The main criticisms of England's tour were poor preparation, player misbehavior, and selection mistakes.
At a press conference at Lord's, Gould and Key said McCullum and Stokes have not had a “bust up,” they did not want McCullum to “completely change” but “to evolve,” the behavior of some players was “unprofessional,” there will be more consequences for underperforming, and a commitment to “better long-term planning” ahead of major test series.
Some changes were already implemented for the Twenty20 World Cup, where England reached the semifinals. Gould implied that performance saved McCullum.
Key acknowledged that England supporters would be disappointed to see the management team go unpunished.
“I know people want punishment and that people then should be sacked for that,” Key said. “That doesn't mean we don't feel like we've gone through some serious pain: Brendon, myself, Ben. It's been as tough a time as I think I've had.”
