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NASA's March 2020 rover entered its final year of engineering before embarking on its journey to the red planet. He has been subjected to a battery of tests to make sure he is ready to land. The last test was to turn the table to check its weight distribution.
In order to determine the center of gravity of the rover, which plays an important role in the assembly process, NASA engineers used a "rotation table". This device rotates the rover one revolution per minute to check exactly where its center of gravity is. If necessary, engineers can add weight to a part of the mobile to balance it perfectly. This ensures that the spacecraft will travel smoothly when it leaves the Earth and finally lands on Mars.
"The process of the spin table is similar to the one used by a service station to balance a new tire before putting it on your car," said Lemil Cordero, mass-market engineer for Mars 2020 at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) from NASA. "We rotate the rover back and forth and look for asymmetries in its mass distribution. Then, as if your service station were putting small weights on the rim of the tire to balance it, we would place small masses of balance on the rover at specific locations so that its center of gravity is exactly where we want it to be. want to. "
The engineers added nine weights in total, weighing 22 kilos together. The weights are made of tungsten, a resistant and corrosion resistant metal, and are fixed to predetermined fixing points on the mobile. Now that adjustments are made, a second round of tests on the rotation table will be held next year at Cape Canaveral.
The goal is for the rover to launch with the Cape Canaveral Mars 2020 spacecraft in July of next year. The craft will visit Mars during a seven-month trip and is expected to land in the Jezero Crater in February 2021. It will collect high-definition images, samples and data on the Jezero crater. Martian environment and will search for traces of ancient waters. especially on the surface.
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