MOTORS, DRIVES & CONTROLS
SEARCHING FOR
SIGNS OF LIFE
The Perseverance rover is equipped with 10 brushless DC motors. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech
M
ars once had liquid water and an atmosphere – was there life too? To answer this fundamental question, NASA is sending the
Perseverance rover, a robot of unparalleled complexity. T e world will be watching live.
Mars missions may seem to be routine
now, yet it’s still the case that only a few craft make it to the planet’s surface intact. T e European Space Agency (ESA) had a painful demonstration of that in 2016 when its lander Schiaparelli smashed into pieces on the Red Planet. Nevertheless, US space agency NASA has already successfully brought four robotic vehicles to Mars in the past. And with the fi fth rover Perseverance, which landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, history was made once again. For the fi rst time, we on Earth were able to see live images of a Mars landing, supplied by high- resolution video cameras. It will still take a while, however,
before people land on Mars. T is is why robots need to do the work for now, and Perseverance has quite a lot of it in store. She landed in the Jezero Crater, which
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was once fi lled with water, with the task of investigating whether the area was once habitable. At the same time, the rover will search for signs of earlier life, known as biosignatures. She is equipped with a variety of measuring instruments for this purpose. Its third task is to pave the way for human missions with a technology demonstration: An instrument named MOXIE will extract oxygen from the small amount present in the Martian atmosphere.
Stefan Roschi reveals how motors are playing a critical role in the current Mars mission
T is technology would be crucial for human missions, as oxygen is not only required for breathing, but can also be used for making fuel.
The rover’s drill head takes a soil sample
THE SECRET OF LIFE We now come to the fourth mission, the most spectacular and most technically demanding: Perseverance will take up to 30 soil samples, place them in individual vessels, seal the vessels and then fi nally deposit them at a suitable location so a later mission can collect the samples and bring them back to Earth. For scientists, it doesn’t get much better than this: getting clean samples from Mars and being able to investigate them here, with all the latest techniques available. As NASA puts it, these samples have the potential to tell us more about the basis and origin of life in our solar system. T ree systems have to work together seamlessly for the sampling to succeed. First, the big robotic arm at the front of the rover drills into the Martian rock and takes a core sample, which is then inserted into a carousel. T e carousel takes the sample inside the rover. T ere, the third
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