Unlike NASA’s Curiosity, the agency will equip future Mars rovers with their revolutionary shape memory alloy (SMA) spring tires, which can return to their original shape after being bent, stretched, heated, and cooled.
Testing these SMA tires saw the NASA team traveling to Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, United Kingdom. In an enclosed facility created to simulate the harsh conditions of Martian terrain, they monitored rovers as the wheels went over rocks, paying close attention to how much the crowns of the tires shifted, any damage, and downhill sliding.
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We at Glenn are one of the world leaders in bringing the science and understanding of how you change the alloy compositions, how you change the processing of the material, and how you model these systems in a way that we can control and stabilize the behaviors so that they can actually be utilized in real applications,” said Dr. Santo Padula II, materials research engineer at NASA Glenn.
