Curiosity landed on Mars in August of 2012. After a year of exploring Gale Crater, JPL engineers noticed some wear on Curiosity’s wheels, in the form of dents and small holes in the wheels’ 0.75mm thick aluminum skin. While not unexpected, the wear on the wheels kept increasing at a higher rate than JPL had planned for. Every 1000 meters of driving, Curiosity snaps some pictures of its wheels so that JPL can keep track of wheel wear. The images above show one of the wheels in pristine condition, along with a MAHLI image taken on 4 April 2021, showing extensive skin damage and a missing grouser on one of the rover’s middle wheels.
As of mid-April, Curiosity has driven a total of 25.246 km, and JPL has found one broken grouser on the right middle wheel along with three broken grousers on the left middle wheel. NASA has come up with a potential solution for wheels in a critical damage state, called wheel shedding. The objective of wheel shedding is to take the broken inner two-thirds of the wheel and completely detach it from the rover to protect that fragile cabling and (hopefully) keep the rover roving. Obviously, the rover is not in the least equipped to do this by itself, but as it turns out Mars is covered in potential wheel shedding tools in the form of pointy rocks.
Credits:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/aerospace/robotic-exploration/if-necessary-mars-rover-curiosity-could-rip-its-own-wheels-off-to-stay-mobile
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