“Aluminium”
wheels for an interplanetary geologist robot
When it sent a probe equipped with a giant robot to explore the
Red planet and to determine whether or not life and water could
exist there, NASA undertook its most complex mission to Mars. With
regard to the probes for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission,
Ed Weiler, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Science,
declared during a press conference at Kennedy Space Center near
Cape Canaveral, FL, “this won’t be like a walk on the
beach on a Sunday afternoon.” He summed up the mission’s
objectives, saying: “We are pursuing a long-term NASA goal
of finding water. On Earth, everywhere where there is water, life
exists. There was water on Mars billions of years ago, and maybe
several hours ago.”
The Rovers, consuming solar energy, can cover 40 meters (131 ft)
per day on Mars, a greater distance than that covered during the
entire Pathfinder mission, whose Sojourner, 10 kg (22 lb) robot
was the first to be on Mars in 1997.
The task of the engineers in charge of the robot’s movement
was to create the lightest possible wheels that were at the same
time resilient and flexible, in order to avoid adding weight to
a spaceship that already weighs a lot! With a diameter of 26 cm
(10 in), these aluminium wheels are two times larger than those
of Sojourner and are capable of withstanding rocks on Mars.
NASA
site for MER missions
All
about aluminium wheels (video and images)
Flash
animation about the mission
An all-aluminium laptop
The 17 inch PowerBook G4 by Apple, the first laptop in the world
with a 17 inch screen, has a sturdy, ultra-light aluminium alloy
enclosure. The laptop is less than 2.6 cm (1 in) thick and weighs
slightly more than 3 kg (6.8 lbs). The lifespan of an aluminium
enclosure is, of course, much longer than that of its plastic equivalent.
Note that the Cupertino Company, with its new interfaces, introduced
a polished aluminium look to some of its software packages.
An
aluminium message for an asteroid
Tokyo
– A Japanese rocket launched in May 2003 contains the world's
first probe designed to bring back samples from the surface of an
asteroid almost 300 million km (186 million miles) from Earth, a
journey that will take four years and cover nearly 600 million kilometers
(400 million miles). The probe should make contact with the small
asteroid 1998 SF36, then return to Earth with samples taken from
the asteroid’s surface. Muses-C needs about 2 years to reach
the asteroid, which is 690 m (2260 ft) in length and 300 m (985
ft) in width, and located “only” about 290 million km
(180 million miles) from Earth. The 500 kg (1100 lb) probe will
first study the celestial body for three months at approx. 20 km
(12 miles) above the surface.
Next the probe will come closer and shoot a sort of missile onto
the surface and collect the fragments emitted by the projectile
with the help of a protruding instrument shaped like a cone attached
to the spacecraft. To get the public interested in the Muses-C project,
Internet users from all over the world were invited to submit their
names: the 877,490 received names were engraved onto a sheet of
aluminium that was placed into a sphere that will be launched onto
the asteroid’s surface. AP
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