Mission: Mars
Powering the search for extraterrestrial life
'Is there life on Mars?' The advanced equipment, which may finally
provide the answer to this age-old question, is within touching distance
of those taking the trouble to visit maxon motors' stand at the Drives
and Controls show later this month. The British-designed Beagle 2 Mars
Exploration Lander will form the centrepiece of stand B15
In June 2003, two separate probes are scheduled to land - within days of
each other - over fifty million miles away on the surface of Mars. One
will be the United States NASA project costing around $400m (£272m). The
other, built for a fraction of the cost, will be a British-led
initiative, which is designed specifically to seek evidence of life (past
or present). The team, under the leadership of UK's Professor Colin
Pillinger, is well advanced in its project to send the Beagle 2 Lander to
Mars, as part of the European Space Agency Mars Express Mission. The
craft is, of course, named after Darwin's famous nineteenth century ship.
With a landed mass of less than 30kg, Beagle 2 represents the most
ambitious science payload-to-systems mass ratio ever attempted. Almost a
third of the payload will carry out various types of analysis or be used
to manipulate and collect samples for study on the surface of Mars. This
is one of the reasons why the team chose maxon motor, which makes some of
the world's tiniest precision motors. The smallest weighs just 2.8g, is
only 6mm in diameter, yet it turns at up to 100,000 revolutions per
minute. maxon motor products were employed in the highly successful Mars
Pathfinder mission three years ago. These included eleven RE Æ16 motors,
16 mm in diameter, which powered the 'Sojourner' landing and testing
vehicle.
Many different aspects of the Mars project involve maxon motor
components. The solar array deployment (the solar 'wings' that power the
craft) and the robotic arm, which supports the panoramic cameras and
other instruments, are both powered by maxon motors. But the most
important are the Mole, code-named PLUTO (Planetary Undersurface Tool)
and the Corer.
These capture samples from the surface and subsurface layer and transfer
them via the arm into Lander's 'laboratory'. By analysing the samples and
looking for fossilised evidence, scientists may be able to finally
provide irrefutable evidence of whether life exists, or ever existed, on
Mars.
For more information on the Beagle 2 visit www.beagle2.com.