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39.48, -82.98 | They can monitor the progress, but these machines are increasingly "intelligent" enough to do a lot autonomously. The present test on the Ingenuity helicopter is a case in point.
NASA engineers did not expect the Martian regolith to respond the way it has. The probe was designed to penetrate like a tiny pile driver -- a so-called self-driving nail. However, the surface material proved to be surprisingly springy and offered less friction against the probe than expected. The probe tended to bounce back out between efforts to drive it in.
Final depth is about 43 cm -- a lot deeper than quoted above but far short of the 5 meter target depth, and too shallow to measure heat transfer, which was its goal. | |
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Martian mole failure
