Drill Issue Continues to Afflict Mars Rover Curiosity

On Dec. 1, Curiosity detected an anomaly with its "drill feed mechanism," which pushes the rover's rock-boring drill outward from the turret on the end of Curiosity's 7-foot-long (2.1 meters) robotic arm. Further work has led to a more definitive diagnosis, said Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.