Curiosity

The Curiosity rover has achieved plenty of firsts in its six months on Mars. And the last first is especially noteworthy: On February 9th, Nasa announced that curiosity had 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.