INL team cheers on Mars Perseverance

IDAHO FALLS, Idaho (KIFI)-A team of Idaho National Laboratory engineers will be keeping a close eye on the Mars 2020 Mission Perseverance Rover as it lands on Jezero Crater, Mars February 18.    It launched July 30, at 5:50 a.m. MT, and has been traveling towards Mars at a rate of about 48,325 miles per hour.

The mission includes the Perseverance Rover, which will search for signs of ancient microbial life and explore the past habitability of Mars.  The spacecraft also carries a Mars helicopter, called Ingenuity, strapped to its belly, which will test the first powered flight on the planet.  Flight tests are planned over 30 Martian days sometime this spring.

NASA has used radioisotope thermoelectric generators to generate power and heat for 27 missions over the past 40 years.

Stephen Johnson leads a 60-member power systems team at the INL.  That team spent five years training, conducting readiness reviews, fueling, testing, and delivering the power source that will provide electrical power and heat for the rover.

In addition to private industry, INL partners with Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Labs to provide radioisotope power systems for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.  The power systems enable deep-space scientific exploration. 

The systems include a heat source that contains plutonium-238 and thermocouples that make electricity by exploiting the temperature difference between plutonium’s decay heat and the cold of space.

“I’m just really happy for everyone associated with this,” Johnson said. “We’re in a fortunate position because we get to see the fruits of our labor, and there are a lot of people (at INL) who don’t get to do that. We get to see it built, see it take off and see it land in a relatively short period of time. This is relatively instant gratification. What a neat sense of accomplishment.”

You can track the mission and learn more about it here.