Electrical problem has cropped up over the last week end in the NASA's Curiosity rover. The rover stopped gathering data for few days. The Mission team noticed a change in the voltage difference between the body of the rover and its electricity distributing power bus on 17th November, 2013. The team suspect that the culprit may be a "soft short", which is a sort of electrical leak through partially conductive material. Curiosity is standing down temporarily while engineers are trying to understand what is the cause of electrical glitch.
The mission team said that the vehicle is safe and stable and fully capable of operating at its present condition but they are taking precautions to investigate the problem. The voltage difference between the power bus and the Curiosity chasis was about 11 volts when the rover touched down inside Mars's Gale crater in August, 2012. Now the voltage difference dropped to about 4 volts.
The issue appears to be unrelated to the software glitch that caused Curiosity to reboot its computer and go into a protective "safe mode" earlier this month, said the Mission team.
Curiosity's primary task is to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. Mission scientists have already achieved this goal, finding that an area near the rover's landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.
The 1 ton rover is now on the task of long drive from Yellowknife Bay to towering Mount Sharp whose foot hills hold a record of Mars' changing environmental conditions over time. If everything goes well as per plan, Curiosity must reach Mountain's base by the middle of 2014.
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