NASA's Mars rover Curiosity halts trek due to troubleshooting problem

Since last four years, Curiosity has been drilling into rocks and chemically analysing the samples.

New Delhi: NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has halted its trek up a mountain which is filled with potential habitats while engineers spotted a problem with one of its important instruments, say scientists.

Curiosity made a marvelous landing on Mars four years ago to determine if the Red planet had some ingredients for life.

Since then, Curiosity has been drilling into rocks and chemically analyzing the samples.

Drilling operations have been suspended however due to a suspected problem with the instrument`s motor, project scientist with NASA`s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Ashwin Vasavada told reporters at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.

The problem first appeared about a week ago, Vasavada said. Project engineers thought they had resolved it, but the problems cropped back up, he said.