When I talked to NASA mechanical engineer Colin Creager about space tires — Mars rover tires to be exact — I asked him about the long wait.
By the time the team finds out if the tires worked, they will have invested at least a decade in building and testing, followed by four years of waiting as the rover is completed and launched into orbit.
Is the waiting the hardest part?
Mr. Creager laughed, acknowledging the wait, but said it also is par for the course for a NASA project, because any small failure can ruin a mission.
"For this particular mission, it will be weird that we will be done in 2024 building them, and then we'll ship them off to the rover team," he said. "But just seeing those tires driving around on Mars is just an extra motivator for us."
The mission is planned to launch in 2026 and reach Mars in 2028.
The Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars in March, will collect samples and leave them in canisters at spots around the Red Planet. The 2026 mission will send a lighter, faster rover to retrieve those samples and deliver them to a launch station to be sent into orbit and, by around 2031, returned to Earth to be studied.
The tires are made of a woven nickel-titanium "smart-memory" alloy that offers the unique characteristic to rearrange itself at an atomic level to handle deformation. Basically, this means the tire can roll over a rocky landscape like that on Mars, endure extreme temperatures and return to shape.
Mr. Creager noted the tire could be deformed to the axle and still return to shape.
I asked if he was stressed that the team would forgot some detail that they may not learn about until the rover is on Mars.
"You wouldn't believe the checks and balances (at NASA)," he said. When the tire was just a research and development project, the team was small. But, he said, when the tire was added to the Mars mission, all of that changed.
Now, the team is huge as NASA Glenn Research Center prepares to hand over the Mars-ready tire in 2024.
Of course, I had to wonder that while having a fantastic team and the most state-of-the-art artificial-intelligence testing capabilities should get you most of the way there, how do you physically test it for Mars?
Mr. Creager noted the NASA philosophy — "test like you fly, fly like you test" — to test technologies in the environments for which they are intended. But added that replicating Mars posed a challenge.
"It's really hard to do on Earth, because you don't have low-gravity chambers or large Martian environmental chambers," he said. Instead, they focused on testing key performance traits.
He said the team is confident the alloy in the tire will stand up to the radiation and atmosphere of Mars, so the big key to testing is focused on how the tire handles deformation at extreme temperatures.
The NASA Glenn facility in Cleveland developed a laboratory where tires can be tested under the same extreme temperatures they will face on Mars. It is like a temperature-controlled track where the engineers can also test durability by building up rocky "Martian-type terrain."
They test the tires to two to three times their expected life-span, he said. By the time the four new tires are ready for the rover in 2024, the team will have made around 40 to 50 versions.
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April 30, 2021 at 10:00PM
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Manley: For NASA engineers, waiting is hardest part - Tire Business
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