Aug 20, 2014 12:01 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has had to double back on its route to Mount Sharp after project managers hit a snag in the Red Planet's "Hidden Valley."

According to Space.com, the "Hidden Valley" is about 100 yards long and Curiosity quickly learned upon entering its northeastern end last month that it would have an issue with traction if it proceeded. Jim Erickson, Curiosity's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said the discovery caught the team off-guard.

"We need to gain a better understanding of the interaction between the wheels and Martian sand ripples, and Hidden Valley is not a good location for experimenting," he said in a press release.

Curiosity has been on a course to Mount Sharp, the centerpiece of the Gale Crater, since NASA landed the rover in Aug. 2012. After spending two Earth years and one Martian year on the Red Planet, Curiosity has already returned a wealth of information and is expected to turn up more one it reaches its ultimate destination.

The one-ton, $2.5 billion rover was set out to determine if Mars could have (or if it did) ever support microbial life. Thus far, various pieces of evidence have indicated it probably could have, but Mount Sharp may hold more a definitive answer.

For now, NASA has determined Curiosity's fourth drilling location, pending approval, a rock the rover's team dubbed the rock "Bonanza King."

"Geologically speaking, we can tie the Bonanza King rocks to those at Pahrump Hills. Studying them here will give us a head start in understanding how they fit into the bigger picture of Gale Crater and Mount Sharp," Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada, of NASA's JPL, said in the release. "This rock has an appearance quite different from the sandstones we've been driving through for several months.

"The landscape is changing, and that's worth checking out."

See Now: Covert Team Inside Newsweek Revealed as Key Players in False Human Trafficking Lawsuit