Last month, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tied up up the installation of the Mars 2020 rover’s 2.1-meter-long robot arm. This is the most strong arm ever installed on a Mars rover. Even though the Mars 2020 rover shares much of its design with Curiosity, the new arm was redesigned to be able to do much more complicated science, drilling into rocks to collect samples that can be saved for later recovery.
 
JPL is well known for growing robots that do astonishing work in unbelievably distant and hostile environments. The Opportunity Mars rover, to name just one example, had a 90-day planned mission but stayed operational for 5,498 days in a robot unfriendly place full of dust and wild temperature swings where even the most basic maintenance or repair is utterly impossible. (Its twin rover, Spirit, operated for 2,269 days.)
 
To learn more about the process behind building robotic systems that are suitable of feats like these, we talked with Matt Robinson, one of the engineers who designed the Mars 2020 rover’s new robot arm.
 
The Mars 2020 rover (which will be officially named through a public contest which opens this fall) is appointed to launch in July of 2020, landing in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. The overall design is similar to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, named Curiosity, which has been exploring Gale Crater on Mars since August 2012, except Mars 2020 will be a bit bigger and capable of doing even more amazing science. It will outweigh Curiosity by about 150 kilograms, but it’s alternatively about the same size, and uses the same type of radioisotope thermoelectric generator for power. Upgraded aluminum wheels will be more durable than Curiosity’s wheels, which have suffered significant wear. Mars 2020 will land on Mars in the same way that Curiosity did, with a mildly insane descent to the surface from a rocket-powered hovering “skycrane.”
 
Mars 2020 really steps it up when it comes to science. The most intriguing new capability (besides serving as the base station for a highly experimental autonomous helicopter) is that the rover will be able to take surface samples of rock and soil, put them into tubes, seal the tubes up, and then cache the tubes on the surface for later retrieval (and potentially return to Earth for analysis). Obtaining the samples is the job of a drill on the end of the robot arm that can be prepared with a diversity of interchangeable bits, but the arm holds a number of other tools as well. A “turret” can swap between the drill, a mineral identification sensor suite called SHERLOC, and an X-ray spectrometer and camera called PIXL. Fundamentally, most of Mars 2020’s science work is going to rely on the arm and the hardware that it holds, both in terms of close-up surface investigations and collecting samples for caching.
 
Matt Robinson is the Deputy Delivery Manager for the Sample Caching System on the Mars 2020 rover, which discusses the robotic arm itself, the drill at the end of the arm, and the sample caching system within the body of the rover that manages the samples. Robinson has been at JPL since 2001, and he’s worked on the Mars Phoenix Lander mission as the robotic arm flight software designer and robotic arm test and operations engineer, as well as on Curiosity as the robotic arm test and operations lead engineer.
 
The way that I look at it is, when you’re making an arm that’s going to go to another planet earth, all the things that could go wrong… You have to build something that’s robust and that can endure all that. It’s not that we’re trying to overdesign arms so that they’ll end up lasting much, much longer, it’s that, given all the things that you can experience within a fairly unknown atmosphere, and the level of robustness of the design you have to apply, it just so happens we end up with designs that end up lasting a lot longer than they do. Which is great, but we’re not held to that, although we’re very excited when we see them last that long. Without any calibration, without any maintenance, exactly, it’s amazing. They show their wear over time, but they still operate, it’s super exciting, it’s very motivating to see.



This article is originally posted on Tronserve.com