Two months before NASA is set to land its most sophisticated rover on Mars, engineers on Earth are busy troubleshooting a nagging concern with the rover's drill that could contaminate rock samples gathered for study.
Project managers said Monday they were confident the rover nicknamed Curiosity will still be able to achieve its goals despite the hurdle.
For the past month, a team has been studying ways to get around the contamination problem, in which flakes of Teflon from the drill can break off and get mixed in with the rock samples. The effort so far has drained $2 million from the mission's reserve budget.
