In January 2004, two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) landed on the surface of Mars to begin their mission as robotic geologists. A year prior to these historic landings, both rovers and the spacecraft that delivered them to Mars, were completing a series of environmental tests in facilities at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This paper describes the test program undertaken to validate the thermal design and verify the workmanship integrity of both rovers and the spacecraft.The spacecraft, which contained the rover within the aeroshell, were tested in a 7.5 m diameter thermal vacuum chamber. Thermal balance was performed for the near earth (hot case) condition and for the near Mars (cold case) condition. A solar simulator was used to provide the solar boundary condition on the solar array. IR lamps were used to simulate the solar heat load on the aeroshell for the off-sun attitudes experienced by the spacecraft during its cruise to Mars.Each rover was tested separately in a 3.0 m diameter thermal vacuum chamber over conditions simulating the warmest and coldest expected Mars diurnal temperature cycles. The environmental tests were conducted in a quiescent nitrogen atmosphere at a pressure of 8 to 10 Torr. In addition to thermal balance testing, the science instruments on board the rovers were tested successfully in the extreme environmental conditions anticipated for the mission. A solar simulator was not used in these tests.


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    Title :

    Mars Exploration Rover Thermal Test Program Overview


    Additional title:

    Sae Technical Papers


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    International Conference On Environmental Systems ; 2004



    Publication date :

    2004-07-19




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Print


    Language :

    English




    Mars Exploration Rover Thermal Test Program Overview

    Pauken, M. T. / Kinsella, G. M. / Novak, K. S. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2004


    Mars Exploration Rover thermal test program overview

    Pauken, Michael T. / Kinsella, Gary / Novak, Keith et al. | NTRS | 2004