We’ve all been following the progress of the Mars Rover Curiosity with…well, curiosity, ever since she successfully landed on Mars’ Gale Crater on August 6, 2012. But in order for our favorite Rover to complete her mission, the engineers who built her had to battle a host of problems, including manufacturing parts that would be resilient not only during the long journey to the Red Planet, but through the harsh conditions of it.
Curiosity undertook the 350,000,000-mile journey to investigate Martian climate and geology, in order to determine whether or not the Red Planet has ever offered conditions that would support life. The Mars Rover is also supposed to assess the role of water and planetary habitability on Mars, to prepare for further human exploration. Both of these goals involve looking closer at Mars’ chemistry, which means they required the development of incredibly complex tools that would still be able to take accurate readings.
Curiosity, the Mars Rover
“The challenge that NASA is facing in this is to be able to launch this 1-ton rover 350-million miles to the surface of Mars and get it there safely without damage,” says Karl Kitts, the engineering director for High performance Relays at TE Connectivity’s aerospace, defense and marine group, of the challenges the team of engineers faced with developing their component, the gas chromatography’s relay switch. “Then they need to have everything power up and all the critical systems work properly the first time, because failure isn’t an option—there’s no way to go out and repair a vehicle on the surface of Mars.”
NASA engineers collaborated with engineers such as Kitts at TE, a company they had turned to before for delicate work on the Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, in order to solve some of the problems they were facing when developing components needed for tools such as Curiosity’s gas chromatography tool.
Curiosity had to be perfect—meaning that the tools it used to complete its task had to perfect. The team had to come up with a tremendously powerful relay switch, one that they were one hundred percent certain would stand up in the extreme conditions of both the journey to and the journey on Mars, where temperatures near Curiosity’s landing site can fluctuate from between -197° to 104°F .
HV Relay
“Our particular switch is used on [Curiosity’s] gas chromatography tool,” says Kitts. “It basically vaporizes mineral samples on the planet and then analyzes their composition.”
Vaporizing material takes a fair amount of energy, so their very small product—the size of a roll of dimes—has a tremendous power handling capability. The team’s component is a 5,000-volt, 35-amp switch, about one-fifth the size of what would be needed for an industrial device using the same amount of power.
Terrain of Mars
The group of engineers and scientists designed the component to reduce as much space and weight as possible for packaging within Curiosity’s instrument bay, and drawing on their collective genius as well as prior work for lunar rovers and satellites, they were able to come up with a component that could withstand the extreme temperatures and conditions of the red planet.
The group’s collaborative work has proven exceptional, as Curiosity’s two-year mission has been indefinitely extended thanks in no small part to the contributions and dedication of Kitts’s team. They have produced a lightweight and reliable product that is proving integral to the Mars Rover’s success.
To learn more about the contributions of Kitts’s team to the Mars Rover, visit www.everyconnectioncounts.com
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