mars opportunity mission parts in stock

Mars Exploration Rover NASA"s twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity launched in separately in 2003 and landed three weeks apart in January 2004. After making important discoveries upon Mars, Spirit ceased communication with Earth in March 2010. NASA’s Opportunity rover has been silent since June 10, 2018 when a plant-encircling dust storm cut its solar power off. NASA continues its effort to make contact with the rover.

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Both rovers exceeded their planned 90-day mission lifetimes by many years. Spirit lasted 20 times longer than its original design until it concluded its mission in 2010. Opportunity has worked on Mars longer than any other robot—nearly 15 years. The rover last communicated with Earth on June 10, 2018, as a planet-wide dust storm blanketed the solar-powered rover’s location on Mars. In 2015, Opportunity broke the record for extraterrestrial travel by driving more than the distance of a marathon, with a total of 28.06 miles (45.16 kilometers).

First among the mission"s scientific goals was to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils for clues to past water activity on Mars. The rovers were targeted to sites on opposite sides of Mars that looked like they were affected by liquid water in the past. Opportunity landed at Meridiani Planum, a possible former lake in a giant impact crater. Spirit landed at Gusev Crater, a place where mineral deposits suggested that Mars had a wet history.

Each rover bounced onto the surface inside a landing craft protected by airbags. When they stopped rolling, the airbags were deflated and the landing craft opened. The rovers rolled out to take panoramic images. These images gave scientists the information they needed to select promising geological targets to tell part of the story of water in Mars" past. Then, the rovers drove to those locations and beyond to perform close-up scientific investigations.

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Build it, take it apart, put it back together, mix and match the parts; theres tons of ways to play with the Machine Maker Mission to Mars Vehicles. Use the included tool to take it apart and activate the different features. Each set has 10 pieces, including a figure, screwdriver, mission accessories, and the machine parts to build up a space vehicle. Combine with other sets to make some crazy new machines, it’s T minus 0 to adventure!

On Tuesday night, engineers at the Space Flight Operations Facility of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, sent their final commands to the rover Opportunity on Mars. With no signal received in reply from the dormant rover, NASA formally announcedtheend ofthe mission today.

“I declare the Opportunity mission as complete, and with it, the Mars Exploration Rover mission as complete,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA. “I have to tell you, this is an emotional time.”

The rover lost contact with Earth on June 10, 2018. A Mars-wide dust storm darkened the otherwise apricot skies of the fourth planet from the sun, starving the rover’s solar panels of needed sunlight. The agency maintained a vigil in hope that once the storm subsided, the rover might reawaken. During the intervening months, NASA blasted a fusillade of commands at the rover—835 in all—in case some signal might be received and operations resumed. After eight months of silence, the agency made the decision to pronounce the time of death and bid the robot farewell.

Opportunity is one-half of a two-rover mission called Mars Exploration Rovers (MER). The rovers landed separately on Mars in January 2004. Opportunity landed in Meridiani Planum near the Martian equator. Spirit, its twin, landed halfway around the planet, at the crater Gusev. The rovers primary missions were to last 90 Mars days, or sols (about 24 hours and 40 minutes). Two thousand sols later, Spirit was still sending science back to Earth, losing contact at last in 2010. Opportunity survived on Mars for over 15 years.

Today there are eight spacecraft from the world’s space agencies on or orbiting Mars, with a handful set to launch next year including NASA’s Mars 2020 rover. A frontier subdued by robotic explorers, Mars bears little resemblance to the planet we knew in 2000, when the MER mission was conceived. At the time, a single spacecraft circled the red planet: the lonely Mars Global Surveyor. NASA’s two previous, high-profile missions to Mars had both failed. Mars Polar Lander crashed into the planet, and Mars Climate Orbiter vanished, either burned up in the Martian atmosphere or deflected off into space.

MER came in the aftermath of failed mission proposals by Ray Arvidson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis; Larry Soderblom of the U.S. Geological Survey; and Steve Squyres, a professor at Cornell University. Each of the three had been beaten by David Paige of University of California, Los Angeles, whose ill-fated Mars Polar Lander was selected for flight by NASA.

“Before Spirit and Opportunity, there was a feeling of longing to get onto the surface so that we could understand what the orbital data were telling us,” Arvidson says. “Seeing Mars from four hundred kilometers above the surface is different than looking at the rock textures and cross bedding and particle sizes and details of mineralogy and picking apart the rocks. That’s how we do geology on Earth. It would be very difficult to understand Earth the way we do just from orbital data—maybe impossible.”

It took five tries to land a mission proposal, evolving finally into a single Mars Exploration Rover. Squyres, the principal investigator of the mission, eventually convinced Dan Goldin, then-administrator of NASA, to send two rovers in case one failed.

The two robotic explorers were built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which had previously landed the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft and its companion rover, Sojourner, in 1997. Pathfinder, which lasted 85 days, was wildly successful in the public imagination. Its little Sojourner rover traveled a whopping one hundred meters—which was one hundred meters farther than anything had ever roved on Mars before. The mission came in at $150 million dollars, and “faster, better, cheaper” became the agency mantra. After the failures of Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter, engineers grimly added to the mantra: “…pick two.”

MER would become an $820 million mission for both rovers—construction through prime mission—which was an unbelievable bargain, particularly considering the unexpected longevity of the spacecraft. (For comparison, Vikings 1 and 2, launched in 1975, were multi-billion-dollar landers when adjusted for inflation.)

“When I was in high school, these rovers landed,” says Heather Justice, the lead rover driver for Opportunity at JPL. “That was the first big NASA thing that I saw that really got me thinking about working in space or robotics. And I remember thinking at that time, maybe someday I’ll do something like that. I didn’t think it was going to bethatmission. They were only supposed to last 90 days!”

Each rover landed using supersonic parachutes to slow down and then airbags which burst outward from all sides before the spacecraft collided with the planet. The rovers hit Mars as the world’s least-destructive meteorites, bouncing and bounding across the planet’s surface like a couple of dice in some giant"s game. Opportunity eventually settled in Eagle crater on Meridiani Planum.

NASA"s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity gained this view of its own heat shield during the rover"s 325th martian day (December 22, 2004). The main structure from the successfully used shield is to the far left. Additional fragments of the heat shield lie in the upper center of the image. The heat shield"s impact mark is visible just above and to the right of the foreground shadow of Opportunity"s camera mast. This view is a mosaic of three images taken with the rover"s navigation camera.

Before the mission, she explains, planetary scientists had certain ideas about Mars, how it operated as a planet, and how it looked from the surface. “The first images down from the Opportunity landing site were really amazing because it was such a different looking planet,” she says. “I gave talks to the general public before the landing and said not to be surprised if it looked like the Sojourner landing site or the Viking landing site. But the Opportunity landing site was really, really different. And that was really cool.”

The science team chose to land at Meridiani because Mars Global Surveyor found spectral evidence of crystalline hematite at that location. “There was a lot of debate at the time of what was the cause of that,” Calvin says. “Was it rock-water interaction? Was it volcanic? I don’t think we understood Mars’s history and water cycle at all. There was so much more detail in the geologic history than we anticipated before the mission.”

The small spherules on the Martian surface in this close-up image are near Fram Crater, visited by NASA"s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity during April 2004. These are examples of the mineral concretions nicknamed "blueberries." Opportunity"s investigation of the hematite-rich concretions during the rover"s three-month prime mission in early 2004 provided evidence of a watery ancient environment.

“To me,” Calvin says, “the two big discoveries are that the hematite signature discovered from orbit is in these spherules, and that we found, with Spirit, places that were basically volcanic vents with nearly pure silica.” The latter find, involving hot water interacting with rock, would have been conducive to habitability—a possible life-supporting ecosystem on Mars millions and millions of years ago, the shadow of which remains today as scars and subtle clues embedded in the rock.

The silica was discovered by accident, a serendipitous side effect of a faulty wheel on the rover Spirit. The wheel jammed, and as the other five wheels dragged it along, an odd, white trench was carved in the Martian dirt. Both rovers had problems with the same wheel, either in rotation or in steering, according to Bill Nelson, the engineering manager for the MER project. “On Spirit, the right front wheel wouldn’t turn, but it would steer. On Opportunity, it would turn but it wouldn’t steer. So we submitted a NASA Lessons Learned that said that we should start leaving off the bad sixth wheel and only make five-wheeled rovers in the future.”

A self-portrait of NASA"s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the solar panels still gleaming in the Martian sunlight and carrying only a thin veneer of dust two years after the rover landed and began exploring the red planet.

Opportunity casts a long shadow over all subsequent Mars rovers, setting a gold standard of JPL engineering. Customized versions of its mobility software are used on the rovers Curiosity and upcoming Mars 2020. Fifteen years of meticulous measurements of Martian dust and its effects will be invaluable for future missions. And then there’s the rover’s durability.

“We have set the off-world record for distance,” Nelson says. “We’ve gone over 45 kilometers. Almost two years ago, we were the winners of the first Mars marathon, and I expect we will hold that record for quite some time to come. I honestly don’t think Curiosity has much hope of traveling nearly as far as we have, and it’s not really clear that Mars 2020 will, either.”

The distance traveled has been a scientific multiplier. “This was a rover that lasted a long time,” says John Callas, the MER project manager at JPL. “NASA had a requirement that to get to full mission success, you had to go at least 600 meters. So we designed this rovering system to go a kilometer—and we were totally over the moon to have that kind of capability at Mars. We never imagined we would be able to go over 45 kilometers. We’ve driven so far.

This scene from the panoramic camera (Pancam) on NASA"s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity looks back toward part of the west rim of Endeavour Crater that the rover drove along, heading southward, during the summer of 2014.

Eagle Crater, where Opportunity landed, is geologically in the Hesperian Period—the middle period of Mars history, roughly concurrent with the Archean Eon on Earth. In 2011, the Opportunity rover reached the Endeavor crater, which is Noachian Period rock, where the oldest geology on Mars can be studied. The last eight years have been like a bonus mission, practically a third vehicle in the MER fleet. “In a sense,” says Callas, “by driving this rover so far, we were able to drive back in time and study much older geology.”

One of the greatest contributions of this mission, Callas says, is an intangible. Every day, scientists and engineers wake up and go to work on Mars. Every day, something new is learned and Mars becomes a little more part of our world. “Until January 2004, we had these occasional visits to Mars. The Viking landers in the seventies. Pathfinder in 1997. We attempted to return in 1999 with Polar Lander. With MER, not only did we visit the surface of Mars, but we stayed there. Every day, new information about the surface of the Mars is coming in from some surface asset. We have entered the era of sustained, daily exploration of the surface of Mars.”

Fifteen years of operation with no service station in sight would be an astonishing, successful stretch for any vehicle, let alone one rolling in the inhospitable climes of Mars. The tawny, frozen, dead world that greeted Opportunity has been wholly changed in the eyes of the earthbound. What once was the inert moon, but red, is now a planet where water once flowed freely and in abundance. The question is no longer: Was Mars wet? The rover Opportunity enabled scientists to ask instead: Did something swim in those waters, and how do we find it?

David W. Brown is the author of One Inch From Earth (Custom House, 2020), about a group of scientists who studied Europa, needed to know more, and spent twenty years convincing NASA to mount a flagship mission there. His work also appears in the New York Times, Scientific American and the Atlantic.

In the opening scenes of the new film "Good Night Oppy," the Opportunity rover rolls along through Perseverance Valley on Mars in June 2018, as "Roam" by The B-52s fills the room at mission control.

The peppy tune was the rover"s wake-up song, played at NASA"s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. In the same way NASA has used a song to wake up astronauts each day they spend in space since the 1960s, the Opportunity rover team began their daily shifts with a song that set the mood for "Oppy"s" journey.

The documentary film "Good Night Oppy" follows the Mars Opportunity rover, which turned what NASA expected to be a 90-day mission into 15 years of exploration on the red planet. Credit:Courtesy of Prime Video

Mission team members still thought of her as their lucky rover, though — invincible. After all, Oppy was designed for a 90-day mission, but she had exceeded all expectations and outlived her twin sister, Spirit, by some seven years.

This chapter is just the beginning of the documentary, available to stream on Amazon Prime on November 23. The film traces the journey of the twin rovers and the people who dedicated their lives to them from concept to that last transmission.

Director Ryan White has woven together decades of footage from the NASA vaults with photorealistic effects and animation from Industrial Light & Magic, the famed visual effects company founded by George Lucas, and narration from actor Angela Bassett. The documentary places the viewer on Mars along with the two rovers as they roam on opposite sides of the red planet.

"Even though the spacecraft was robotic, the mission was human," said Doug Ellison, engineering camera team lead for the Curiosity Rover at JPL, who also worked on Opportunity"s mission.

As NASA engineers built and tested the twin rovers in the early 2000s, they quickly realized the robots couldn"t be more different. Spirit was the headstrong drama queen while Opportunity was the overachiever, according to team members. Spirit was stubborn and struggled through the same tests that Opportunity breezed through. Their personalities seemed as human as their design.

The rovers were built to search for past evidence of water on Mars. Both launched in 2003 inside protective shells aboard Delta rockets and landed in 2004 on opposite sides of the red planet. The dual mission"s first 90 days came and went, and the JPL team realized the two rovers were ready for more adventure.

This image is a cropped version of the last 360-degree panorama taken by the Opportunity rover"s panoramic camera from May 13 through June 10, 2018. The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU

Together, Spirit and Opportunity"s findings would rewrite the textbooks with new information about the red planet and its intriguing, watery past — and they both got into all sorts of trouble in between discoveries, like getting stuck in the sand and nearly careening down the sides of steep craters.

The bonds between team members and the rovers quickly deepened, despite the vast distance between Earth and Mars — making it all the more difficult when Spirit"s journey ended in 2011 and Opportunity fell silent in 2018. There was hope for both rovers to "wake up" until the bitter end.

"The way that the (Opportunity) mission ended was very sudden," Ellison told CNN. "We had a very happy and healthy rover one week, and then this dust storm came along and took it all away. ... You can call it a death in the family. It was very sudden, it was very traumatic. And getting to revisit it was really kind of emotionally rewarding."

A self-professed "space geek," White grew up in the 1980s and followed space missions. The project became his "lifesaver, getting to work on something so joyful during such a dark time," he said.

Industrial Light & Magic took up the task of bringing Mars to life in a way that had never been seen on film before. Shot by shot, ILM team members worked with NASA to confirm what they depicted was accurate to the rovers" experience.

The end result is as close as viewers may get to standing on the surface of Mars, with camera angles that feel like they were filmed on the red planet itself.

A mission team member inspects the NASA Opportunity rover. The team grew emotionally attached to the robotic Mars explorer and its twin, Spirit. Credit:Courtesy of Prime Video

Spirit and Oppy"s missions have ended, but Mars exploration continues today through next-generation rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance. The latter launched in July 2020 as White was working on the documentary.

"All of these missions, as a cadence, are the precursor for sending humans there to carry on that adventure in the future," Ellison said. "I hope that the next generation of engineers and explorers, people like my little 4-year-old girl, can see documentaries like this and go, "I want to do some of that, too. I want to be a part of an adventure like that.""

Aspiring teenage astronauts explore the curriculum at NASA"s Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, as they chase dreams of traveling to Mars one day. Experts also weigh in on NASA"s history and future and the practicality of colonizing another planet, revealing the first human journey to Mars is closer than you might think.

Based on the novel by Andy Weir, the optimistic sci-fi film by Ridley Scott follows a stranded astronaut who must find clever ways to survive on barren Mars with only a few supplies and no way to contact Earth.

Steven Squyres, mission manager for the Mars Exploration Rover Project, shares the story behind the landing of the twin rovers in 2004. With the many setbacks in the mission"s early start, and the race against the clock to finish building the two rovers before launch, Squyres gives readers a front-row seat and his expert insights on the rovers" first findings.

Released 50 years after NASA"s Apollo 11 mission, this critically acclaimed documentary breaks down the final moments of preparation in 1969 leading up to the landing of the first human on the moon. With current Artemis missions set to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon in the coming decade, NASA hopes further lunar discovery will eventually lead to the first human setting foot on Mars, making the findings from the historic Apollo 11 mission more important than ever.

Employees at Windings, Inc., manufacturer of stators and electric motor components, watched the Mars rover landing with special interest this week. They made some of the parts on the Perseverance rover that will be exploring the surface of Mars.

NEW ULM — Many different types of parts and products are manufactured in New Ulm and these parts are sent all over the world. In some cases, they are sent out of this world.

Windings have manufactured several items for NASA over the years. The parts built for Perseverance were not the first from Windings to end up in space.

The Windings webpage lists some of the space missions that have including components and assemblies produced by the company. The mission list includes space vehicles, satellites, Parker Solar Probe, Curiosity Mars Rover and Perseverance Rover.

The exact parts Windings manufactured for the Perseverance Rover are a secret, but Windings Director of Marketing David Hansen was able to share that Windings provided components for the rover’s robotic arm and coring turret drill.

The Perseverance Rover’s main task on Mars will be to seek signs of ancient life and collect samples of rock and regolith for a possible return to Earth.

Perseverance was launched July 30, 2020 and after six months landed at Jezero Crater of Mars. Hitching a ride on the Perseverance rover is a helicopter named Ingenuity. This will be the first aircraft to attempt a powered, controlled flight on another planet.

SPARKS, Nev.,July 28, 2020 –Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC), the global aerospace and national security leader owned by Eren and Fatih Ozmen, has contributed eight unique components being used on NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, including parts that enable the rover’s safe and stable descent onto the Martian surface. This is the 14th Mars mission that SNC has supported through its critical parts and components.

“These applications are the heart of the Mars 2020 mission,” said SNC CEO Fatih Ozmen. “We are so excited that SNC’s custom-designed engineering is facilitating the groundbreaking work NASA wants to accomplish, in collecting samples from the Mars surface and preparing them to send back to Earth for analysis. We’re so proud to once again be part of the team.”

SNC engineering will be front and center when Perseverance makes it descent onto the red planet using the sky crane maneuver. Without the SNC-engineered descent brake mechanism, which has been utilized on prior Mars missions as well, the rover could not safely land on the surface of Mars. The descent brake ensures the rover lowers to Mars in a controlled manner. If the rover is lowered too slowly, the sky crane could run out of fuel and crash before getting the rover to the Mars surface.

Perseverance is also making history by carrying Ingenuity, the first helicopter to fly on another planet. SNC will play a crucial part in getting Ingenuity airborne, having developed the mechanism that assists in its deployment. Once in flight, Ingenuity will study Mars from above, scouting locations for Perseverance to explore.

SNC has supplied more than 4,000 subsystems and components to the U.S. government, prime contractors and international customers since 1987, on over 400 space missions, with 100% mission success.

About Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC)Owned by Chairwoman and President Eren Ozmen and CEO Fatih Ozmen, SNC is a trusted leader in solving the world’s toughest challenges through best-of-breed, open architecture engineering in Space Systems, Commercial Solutions, and National Security and Defense. SNC is recognized among The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Space, as a Tier One Superior Supplier for the U.S. Air Force and is the only aerospace and defense firm selected as a 2020 US Best Managed Company. For nearly 60 years, SNC has delivered state-of-the-art civil, military and commercial solutions including more than 4,000 space systems, subsystems and components to customers worldwide, and participation in more than 450 missions to space, including to Mars.

OREM, Utah – As the Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of Mars Thursday, a group of scientists, engineers and executives huddled in a conference room and watched NASA’s live coverage anxiously.

The employees of MOXTEK Inc. had precious cargo on board — parts expected to play an important role in the search for signs of ancient life on the red planet.

“That’s how they’ll be able to distinguish normal rock from possibly organic, fossil rock,” Parker said. “We’re basically shining a light on whether or not there was life on Mars.”

“What I think is unique about our X-ray products and why NASA and JPL require it is because they’re super durable, super light and they take low power,” Ogden explained. “You can run these on a battery anywhere in the world or, of course, on Mars.”

The company’s components, Ogden said, are currently slated to be part of three future space missions, including one aimed at studying the weather on the sun.

This video clip shows a 3D printing technique where a printer head scans over each layer of a part, blowing metal powder which is melted by a laser. It’s one of several ways parts are 3D printed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but was not used to create the parts aboard the Perseverance rover.

If you want to see science fiction at work, visit a modern machine shop, where 3D printers create materials in just about any shape you can imagine. NASA is exploring the technique – known as additive manufacturing when used by specialized engineers – to build rocket engines as well as potential outposts on the Moon and Mars. Nearer in the future is a different milestone: NASA’s Perseverance rover, which lands on the Red Planet on February 18, 2021, carries 11 metal parts made with 3D printing.

Curiosity, Perseverance’s predecessor, was the first mission to take 3D printing to the Red Planet. It landed in 2012 with a 3D-printed ceramic part inside the rover’s ovenlike Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. NASA has since continued to test 3D printing for use in spacecraft to make sure the reliability of the parts is well understood.

As “secondary structures,” Perseverance’s printed parts wouldn’t jeopardize the mission if they didn’t work as planned, but as Pate said, “Flying these parts to Mars is a huge milestone that opens the door a little more for additive manufacturing in the space industry.”

The outer shell of PIXL, one of the instruments aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, includes several parts that were made of 3D-printed titanium. The inset shows the front half of the two-piece shell part it was finished. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Of the 11 printed parts going to Mars, five are in Perseverance’s PIXL instrument. Short for the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, the lunchbox-size device will help the rover seek out signs of fossilized microbial life by shooting X-ray beams at rock surfaces to analyze them.

PIXL shares space with other tools in the 88-pound (40-kilogram) rotating turret at the end of the rover’s 7-foot-long (2-meter-long) robotic arm. To make the instrument as light as possible, the JPL team designed PIXL’s two-piece titanium shell, a mounting frame, and two support struts that secure the shell to the end of the arm to be hollow and extremely thin. In fact, the parts, which were 3D printed by a vendor called Carpenter Additive, have three or four times less mass than if they’d been produced conventionally.

This X-ray image shows the interior of a 3D-printed heat exchanger in Perseverance’s MOXIE instrument. X-ray images like these are used to check for defects within parts. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Perseverance’s six other 3D-printed parts can be found in an instrument called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, or MOXIE. This device will test technology that, in the future, could produce industrial quantities of oxygen to create rocket propellant on Mars, helping astronauts launch back to Earth.

To create oxygen, MOXIE heats Martian air up to nearly 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). Within the device are six heat exchangers – palm-size nickel-alloy plates that protect key parts of the instrument from the effects of high temperatures.

While a conventionally machined heat exchanger would need to be made out of two parts and welded together, MOXIE’s were each 3D-printed as a single piece at nearby Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA.

“These kinds of nickel parts are called superalloys because they maintain their strength even at very high temperatures,” said Samad Firdosy, a material engineer at JPL who helped develop the heat exchangers. “Superalloys are typically found in jet engines or power-generating turbines. They’re really good at resisting corrosion, even while really hot.”

“I really love microstructures,” Firdosy said. “For me to see that kind of detail as material is printed, and how it evolves to make this functional part that’s flying to Mars – that’s very cool.”

A key objective of Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).

Subsequent missions, currently under consideration by NASA in cooperation with ESA (the European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these cached samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.

The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration plans.

An instrument system that is part of NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover, scheduled to land on Mars this month, uses components 3D printed through electron beam melting (EBM) by Carpenter Additive. The titanium parts were challenging to produce because of a design relying on internal lattices and other delicate features to achieve high strength despite minimal material use in accordance with a strict mass budget. As this episode of The Cool Parts Show describes, NASA engineers had to design these components without considering how they might be made. The resulting manufacturing process demands not just 3D printing, but also a sequence of postprocessing steps including chemical milling.

See replicas of the Perseverance additive manufactured parts in this episode, which we filmed while Perseverance itself was in the final days of its approach to Mars.

The Cool Parts Show is a video series from Additive Manufacturing Media that explores the what, how and why of unusual 3D printed parts. Watch more here.

That"s right, and we have parts that are on their way to Mars. We have replicas of parts headed to Mars. These are components of NASA"s Perseverance rover, scheduled to land on the surface of Mars, February 18th.

That"s right, these parts are cool, because they are on their way to another planet. But they were also very difficult to manufacture. 3D printing played a big part, but it doesn"t tell the whole story, and we"re going to take you through that process today.

Yeah, among other things, these parts are examples of extreme lightweighting. They had to fulfill their function within a very strict budget of the amount of mass they"re allowed to have. That ultimately shaped a lot of the manufacturing considerations and the number of steps that were involved. These replica parts haven"t undergone all of those steps, so these are unfinished compared to what"s on their way to Mars, they don"t look exactly like them. But they"re plenty to let us talk about all the challenges that went into making these special parts. There are four components here — they all go together. Stephanie, could you describe the system that these components are a part of?

Yeah, so these are all part of the PIXL. It"s the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry. So part of the Perseverance Rover"s mission is to assess the potential for life on Mars and this instrument is going to be part of that mission. So the PIXL is going to be used to look at rock and soil samples on the planet"s surface, look for those signs of life. And the other interesting thing to note about it is that it"s going to be on the end of this cantilever arm, basically on top of a hammer drill. So not only do these components, this instrument, have to survive the launch, the spaceflight, the crash landing on Mars — they"re also going to be in a really challenging location on the rover when it"s actually in use.

The parts are titanium, Ti64, they are made through electron beam melting. These components were designed by NASA engineers and produced through additive manufacturing by Carpenter Additive.

And we should say you may have seen Carpenter Additive as a sponsor on other episodes of The Cool Parts Show. This is not sponsored content, we just really think these parts are cool.

Right, and we think you"ll agree. So, Stephanie, you mentioned how 3D printing is not the whole story here. That"s pretty crucial, and we"re going to draw that out. 3D printing was essential for producing these complex parts — more complex than they seem to be, we"ll get to that — but 3D printing was not sufficient for producing them. There were a variety of postprocessing operations necessary to complete these parts to the design requirements that NASA had. Carpenter oversaw that, they put together that sequence of steps and delivered that process, 3D printing through post processing. If you think about it, what the NASA engineers were tasked with — so yeah, that PIXL device, it has to perform its duty at the end of that drill. And let"s not minimize: it"s got to survive a trip through space, it"s got to survive landing on the surface of Mars, it"s got to do everything it needs to do within very constrained limitations of how heavy it can be. In the end, the designers didn"t have bandwidth to think about, “Could these parts even be made?” And it turns out, they"re pretty difficult to produce.

Right, so if you step back and you look at these components, it"s like, they"re simple parts or simple in what they do. These are brackets, this is a housing component, right? Seemingly, these are the mundane parts of the instrument. But if you"re not careful, these components could eat up all of your mass budget and you need that mass, you need it for the sensors and the electronics that let this instrument do the work it needs to do. So how do you get weight out of parts like these? It comes down to design consideration, it comes down to aspects of the design you wouldn"t even have to worry about if this was being used on Earth. For example, in places and angles where two surfaces come together, not allowing the fillet there, or the web of material to be as large in diameter as you might otherwise allow it to be, because that"s just a little bit too much metal in there and it eats up mass unnecessarily. Or components like these, which look like they could have been made out of, say, bent sheet metal. What parts like these actually are, are very, very thin wall structures that are hollow inside and have delicate lattices that provide the strength at minimal weight. I think this is a good moment to hear from Carpenter Additive, let"s bring in Ken Davis, who is director of Additive Technology.

Yeah, and that"s an important distinction. Like these are sort of similar processes, they"re both powder bed fusion — you have your bed of powder, you have a recoater, and then you have an energy source, either that laser or the electron beam that"s melting the powder together to form your parts. But with laser sintering, the unused powder kind of stays loose in the bed. And with electron beam melting, you"re printing at a really high temperature, the whole machine is at a really high temperature. So you"re basically heat treating at the same time you"re printing. You don"t end up with solid parts in loose powder, you end up with solid parts in this kind of like semi-sintered cake of powder. Like you"re saying, you get some trade-offs with that. You may lose some of the detail and resolution that you could get out of a laser process, but you"re also able to avoid some of the challenges with support structures and the thermal stresses that you might get from that other process.

Thermal stresses are what was really key in what drove the choice in this case. Electron beam melting uses a coarser powder, so even though it is a fine-detail process, at its finest it still produces thicker, heavier forms and features than a laser-based process does. But electron beam melting offers that opportunity to reduce and control thermal stresses, and that was really critical here because the Carpenter engineers just didn"t have the opportunity to add extra material here and there to provide a little bit of bolstering and support against the warping that might happen due to thermal stresses as the parts were being built. That lower thermal stress environment was what was essential for producing these really fine-detail forms for maintaining the geometric fidelity of these fine-detail parts and features.

Okay, so electron beam melting becomes the manufacturing solution here. But there"s still trade-offs, like this introduces some really interesting postprocessing challenges, because a lot of these pieces are hollow. If you"re 3D printing with electron beam melting, and you end up with this like semi-sintered cake of powder inside your parts, you can"t just pour it out. So, let"s talk postprocessing. How did they get that powder out?

Normally, we use manual tools and agitation to clear this powder and break it apart. But we couldn"t get into these small box beams through small access holes that are only about five millimeters in diameter. So we use a technique called ultrasonic powder removal where a transducer is attached to the part, you manually tune the transducer to a frequency that meets the natural frequency of that powder inside and causes it to break apart. But then as it breaks apart, that structure changes its natural frequency, so you have to keep manually retuning. A very small part that would fit in the palm of my hand was so complex, that it took, in some cases, two days of labor to manually adjust this tuning process to get all that powder extracted. But without the ultrasonic powder extraction, we would have never gotten all that powder out of the parts.

So, that"s how they got the powder out. But after that, these components are still too big. They"re the right shape, they"re accurately the right shape, but the features of these components still have too much material, too much mass. Electron beam melting, for all its precision, is still too coarse for some of the delicacy that these features required. For metal 3D-printed parts, machining is pretty typical as an operation after the 3D printing. But machining as we usually think of it — a tool cutting metal — wasn"t sufficient for the needs of parts like these.

As we always say, it"s never just additive manufacturing, there"s subtractive and other processes that are involved. Additive is just one of the tools you bring to bear on this project, or on any project. And never does a project demonstrate that more than this one. So we couldn"t print these thin walls, some were down as thin as 15 thousandths of an inch with a ±one-thousandths tolerance, and then in that same component, it would thicken up to 45 or 60 thousandths in other areas, and then there would be some very heavy features where a bolt was added to the part. What we ended up doing was printing the parts much thicker in general, to a wall thickness that we could guarantee that we could maintain and reproduce print over print with a very narrow tolerance. Then we used chemical milling selectively around the part to bring various wall thicknesses not just into size, but also to achieve the surface finish we desired.

Okay, so we"ve heard electron beam melting, we"ve heard ultrasonic vibration for powder removal, we"ve heard chemical milling, there"s a longer list of operations than that. Can you give us a more thorough sequence of the operations that went into making these parts?

So, there"s a lot. I have a cheat sheet here because I don"t want to forget anything. Taking us all the way back to the printing process, electron beam melting to make the parts; everything went through HIPing, hot isostatic pressing, to eliminate any kind of porosity; then there was breakout, so pulling the parts out of that cake of powder; support removal, some of these parts had sacrificial supports that were attached that had to be removed; ultrasonic powder removal, like we"ve talked about; deburring and grit blasting; chemical milling also, which we just talked about; they used microtek finishing, which is sort of like a polishing process with an abrasive slurry; and then there was some conventional final machining on these parts as well. But one more thing, in between every single one of those steps I just mentioned, there was also inspection. So they used laser scanning, they used X-ray inspection, they weighed the parts in different stages. These are really complicated components and Carpenter wanted to be sure that if anything was going awry, they could catch it really quickly and start over. They didn"t want to put a bad part through all of these different processes. And then at the very end, everything went through CMM inspection before it got shipped off to NASA.

It"s worth saying, additive manufacturing usually is not this difficult. These were distinctive parts, special demands called for special processing considerations.

So we hope for and anticipate a successful landing of NASA"s Perseverance rover on Mars on February 18th. When that happens, when it"s in the news, look for the PIXL device on the rover. Look for these components made through additive manufacturing, look for these cool parts on the surface of Mars.

All right, I think we got this. I"ll start. So these are components of the PIXL instrument for the Perseverance rover currently on its way to Mars. They were 3D printed with electron beam melting out of titanium by Carpenter Additive, who was very limited in the kinds of design changes that it could make. It had to really adhere to NASA"s mass budget and stick to the original design.

Electron beam melting was just the beginning, it accurately produced parts to the right form, but the parts were far from complete at that stage. Getting the powder out was a postprocessing step that came next. A special ultrasonic vibration process was necessary to accomplish that, get the unfused powder out of the parts. Next came a sequence of postprocessing steps necessary to complete these components, one of which was chemical milling for removing unneeded material, getting a little bit more mass out to get it to that mass budget. NASA engineers did not design these components, thinking about how they would be made — there was too many other things to think about. Ultimately, Carpenter Additive took on the challenge of manufacturing these parts and saw them through to an additive manufacturing process complete with postprocessing that was able to deliver these parts effectively.

Speaking of additive manufacturing wins, if you are interested in seeing the kinds of things that additive manufacturing is accomplishing on Earth check out our previous episodes. We have done more than 20 episodes now of The Cool Parts Show. Each one focused on a transformative 3D-printed part, all kinds of applications, many different products and industries. Go to TheCoolPartsShow.com.

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