“We’re ecstatic. It’s a great day here,” said Richard Fisher, president of Pacific Design Technologies, Inc. (PDT), Monday after confirming the critical mechanical component they built survived the trip, the “seven minutes of terror” and is now working properly on the surface of Mars.
“I called JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and they told me that so far all the readings are good.” The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has had PDT’s test model up and running in the lab for nine years now without a hitch. “I’m pretty confident it will work just fine,” said Fisher of the component installed on Curiosity. The cooling system was built in Goleta, but one of the top men on the project, Larry Theriault, the company’s production manager, lives in the Valley. He spoke of the project several days before the scheduled landing.
Sitting back in his living room on the eve of his vacation to Alaska (along with a friend from kindergarten), he smiles confidently, peppering the discussion with small chuckles. Giddy with anticipation, his plan was to listen in for the landing wherever he happened to be.
“I’m proud of our system and I’m proud of what we have been able to do as a small company,” he said. But, he notes realistically, that “60% of all Mars experimentation fails.”
The rollout of the project was on Aug. 7, 2008, with the craft originally scheduled to fly in 2009. “It takes a while to get a vehicle up,” Theriault explained, so there is a lengthy delay from when PDT finishes their end of the project to when they see it in use. But that doesn’t quell their enthusiasm.
Discreetly not mentioning names, Theriault said PDT’s original employees once upon a time worked for a different large company on the Santa Barbara coast. When it upped and moved, few of the locals went with it. Instead, six of them created PDT.
Located at almost the same address as before, Theriault describes them as “a BB in a beer can” – a tiny operation in a vast expanse of building. Because PDT’s designers previously worked on Mars landing craft, they were asked by JPL if they would build the cooling system for the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
That original contract took them through the critical start up phase of PDT. “Now NASA is a very small percentage of our business,” says Fisher, whose company has grown to 30 employees. But there is nothing small about their zeal to work on JPL projects.
“It’s just a very interesting and challenging program to work for. They have absolutely brilliant people at NASA,” said Fisher. What goes unspoken is the honor of being chosen to provide such an important component to the success of the mission.
What happens, Theriault explains, is that rovers have to function in an environment where there is too much heat during the Martian day. “You have to get rid of that heat. That’s where we come in. It’s a two-fold thing.” Previous rovers had to hibernate at night because on the flip side, Martian nights are cold. Hibernation is no longer needed. Technically, said Theriault, they built the cooling system. But for all practical matters, it is also the heating system. “We are really excited about the cooling system on the rover itself.” Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Reduced to its simplest terms, the system contains a radioactive surface that generates heat, which is then turned into power.
“The power source will last longer than the vehicle. It only takes about 150 watts to run the whole vehicle” – only a fraction of the 2,000 watts of energy the system generates, said Theriault. “It’s pretty amazing if you think about it.” Those extra watts of energy can now be used to warm Curiosity at night, explains Theriault. “We call it a cooling system, but it’s really a heating and cooling system.
All of the prior rovers used solar panels, but Martian dust can collect on the panels negatively affecting energy production, said Theriault. PDT’s system is pump-based and avoids that issue altogether.
Ours is the first pump-based system used on another planet, said Fisher, “so we’re pretty excited about it.” They are not the only ones.