NASA's InSight Mars lander has a device called a mole that is supposed to jackhammer into the Martian soil and collect a wide range of scientific data that hasn't been available from surface-only instruments.
Unfortunately, the mole hit a clump of Martian soil that was too thick for it to properly penetrate. Every time researchers told it to try the mole pushed the lander up instead of pushing the drill through the clump.
If you encounter this problem in a carpentry project, the usual solution is some kind of pilot hole or additional pressure on whatever you're using to penetrate the surface. This is why you might see someone leaning down over a drill to put more weight behind it. That solution was not available to the InSight team since the nearest person who could lean on the drill was more than 35 million miles away. Another option is to whack the driver and pound it through the obstruction in the same way that a hammer's impact drives a nail into whatever it's set on. This, it turned out, was something the lander could do.
And so the lander operators took the shovel that was used for scooping soil samples and, as the mole was trying to hammer into the soil, whacked it. The additional impact force worked and the mole was able to penetrate more deeply than just with its jackhammer feature alone. Since the shovel was striking the mole in just about the same spot that its power and fiber-optic cables connected it to the lander, a lot of skill and practice was required. So even though the problem was discovered early the operating team is only just now trying it out.
The number of other problems that could be solved by whacking them with a shovel is left as an exercise for the student.
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