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Preventing Wear and Tear on Mars Rovers
Before humans even set foot on Mars, they will already have a cache of Martian rocks and soil to study back on Earth, thanks to the Mars Perseverance rover, which landed on the planet in February.
The rover’s caching system — which uses a drill to capture samples and place them in tubes — was optimized with the help of Ashlie Martini ’98, ’07 PhD, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Merced.
An expert in tribology — the study of friction, wear and lubrication — Martini joined forces with one of her former graduate students who now works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to study lubricants for the rover’s mechanical parts. Because Mars is too cold for normal lubricants like grease to work, engineers use solid lubricant coatings to ensure that mechanical components function smoothly and don’t need maintenance after they leave Earth. So JPL teamed up with Martini and used her lab’s tribometer — an instrument for measuring friction and wear — to test solid lubricant coatings under various environmental conditions.
Martini, who studied under mechanical engineering professor Q. Jane Wang ’93 PhD, says, “tribologists are not in the news a lot, so it’s a neat opportunity for our field to be in the spotlight.”
