Landing the Curiosity Rover on Mars was a major endeavor for NASA. Not only did it cost the United States Government millions of dollars, but it required precise controls and a lot of work from the team on Earth. While the landing was a clear success, that doesn't mean that Curiosity won't break down or get damaged. Case in point, NASA's decision to temporarily delay Curiosity to fix a short circuit.
NASA released information on Tuesday which revealed their plans to delay Curiosity for several days in order to check for short circuit. According to NASA, this delay occured "following an onboard fault-protection action on Feb. 27 that halted a process of transferring sample material between devices on the rover's robotic arm." The space agency said Curiosity was moving rock powder into one of the experiment containers when the arm supposedly short circuited. This was reportedly the sixth time Curiosity performed the function.
Curiosity Mission Manager Jim Erickson stated in the press release that "We are running tests on the vehicle in its present configuration before we move the arm or drive.....This gives us the best opportunity to determine where the short is."
This is to be expected, though. Whenever there's a technological failure on Curiosity, the rover will shut down for a time and complete a series of tests. If the tests disocver that the failure will not affect the mission, the rover will continue the mission. If the failure does affect the mission, the rover wll disable the affected feature(s) and move forward accordingly.
