More 60-Second Space The Curiosity rover has achieved plenty of
firsts in its six months on Mars. And the last first is
especially noteworthy: on February 9th, Curiosity made the
inaugural run of its drill, boring into a rock to extract a
sample from the interior. It thus became the first robot ever to
drill on Mars. Curiosity has now gotten some use from most of
its science instruments, but not all of them are working. At a
conference at U.C.L.A., deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada
explained that problems are facing the rover’s wind and humidity
sensors: “The humidity sensor is being calibrated. They think
it’s going to produce some good data—it’s measuring a good
signal. It’s just the physical units don’t quite make sense
right now.” Worse is the wind sensor, damaged during the rover’s
landing. “The wind sensor is actually six different sensors. We
lost two of them during landing, and the other four are proving
pretty hard to interpret as well. So we actually have no wind
data yet.” A few glitches are