Holes in Curiosity's Wheels

[bartman (Bart)]

Not sure how many people picked up on this, but I only did today.

Studying numerous pics of Curiosity, I noticed the 'holes' in the tread of the wheels . I thought they might have something to do with traction/ dispersing dirt/ dispersing water ( hehehe). Then I noticed they were random holes at different lengths.

Google is my friend....

"Though its landing was entirely different, Curiosity learned some tricks from Spirit and Opportunity. Those rovers' wheels had small holes by which they were clamped to their landing pads before being released. Later, the rovers' handlers found they could see when the wheels were slipping on the sandy Martian surface by measuring the distance between the marks left by these holes in the rovers' tracks.
So Curiosity also has holes in its wheels, which spell out "JPL" (for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the rover was built and is operated) in Morse code."
from this site.

and attached is a pic to clarify
Love that little touch of leaving a 'mark' on Mars
-.-. .... . . .-. ...

Bartman

[Astro_Bot]

Very interesting. Thanks for posting that.

[bartman (Bart)]

Just as an adage....
I'm trying to get the people at work interested by showing them some of the pics coming from Mars/Curiosity.

Some were like WOW! tahts fantastic, some were like yeah wat eva.

Then I tried to explain my little personal discovery about the dots/dashes in the wheels.......
Their comments were all positive!!!!!!!
They called me a geek, nerd, alien, nutter, strange......and also comments like " how the what the?????"

One comment was " I would not have figured that out in a million years" , to which I responded: " yes you would.... using your futuristic scanning device, it would have recognized the morse code and found that it was from your fore-fathers..."


Bartman

[Ric]

Great find Bart, I didn't realise that.

There's some cluey chaps over there at JPL.

Cheers

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Very neat Bart. What an obviously efficient method by which to estimate slippage. Well... Now that you've mentioned it.

[troypiggo (Troy)]

So cool. It's almost like NASA employs people that are really smart and think of the cleverest things

[Suzy]

Originally Posted by bartman

Just as an adage....

One comment was " I would not have figured that out in a million years" , to which I responded: " yes you would.... using your futuristic scanning device, it would have recognized the morse code and found that it was from your fore-fathers..."


Bartman

Gold!


Yep, I was reading about this on fb the other day, the technology these days is mind blowing!

[tlgerdes (Trevor)]

I wonder if the martian graffiti police will say something?

[Nico13 (Ken)]

Yep I like a lot of others also thought it was just there to let the sand etc fall out through as it rolled along or give better grip on some surfaces.

Sorta reminds me of the old school shoes with the paw print in the sole.

[SkyViking (Rolf)]

Haha that's cool, I was wondering about those holes too. BTW I love these massive rover wheels, they look so awesome.

[ZeroID (Brent)]

Talk about tagging ... everywhere you go .

Real cool