Up up and away: Local batteries make their way to Mars
On Feb. 18, NASA announced the Mars Perseverance Rover landed on the red planet. To get there, it took many different bits and pieces, some of which were produced in Missouri. EaglePicher Technologies in Joplin produced the batteries on board the rover.
“Packed with groundbreaking technology, the Mars 2020 mission launched July 30, 2020, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida,” a Feb. 18 NASA press release read. “The Perseverance rover mission marks an ambitious first step in the effort to collect Mars samples and return them to Earth.”
Jackie Kennedy, program manager of EaglePicher Technologies, oversaw the main lithium ion battery and two thermal batteries for entry and descent.
Kennedy said their work on the batteries started in early 2018. It was a rather quick project for the company to work on. Overall, it took around a year and a half.
Building the battery did not cost much time or money, Kennedy said. But the paperwork and testing did.
Maxwell Murphy, test lab manager at EaglePicher Technologies, worked on one of the three main testing categories for the battery.
“Whenever we do the testing on the Mars rover battery, we submit it to all sorts of testing,” Murphy said. “One of those is vibration testing. I was the test engineer that oversaw this.”
Vibration testing was done “to ensure the batteries would survive when launching from Earth and entering the Martian atmosphere,” according to Murphy.
In addition to vibration testing, Murphy said the battery must go through electrical and thermal vacuum testing. During electrical testing, the electrical components are tested to make sure they will perform as intended.
“Thermal vacuum testing is used to simulate near perfect vacuum conditions,” Murphy said. “Between Earth and Mars there’s a lot of space, so we have to make sure the batteries will survive the harsh conditions of space.”
Murphy said now that the batteries are on Martian soil there is no direct involvement between EaglePicher and NASA. However, they are working together on future projects including the Orion Spacecraft.
NASA said in a press release published in July 2019, “The Orion spacecraft is part of NASA’s backbone for deep space exploration that will land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024.”
Working on this spacecraft will add to the list of projects EaglePicher has completed with NASA.
Kennedy said in 1968, EaglePicher had batteries on the Explorer 1. In a NASA article, it is explained that “Explorer 1 became the first successfully launched satellite by the United States when it was sent to space on Jan. 31, 1958.”
Additionally, Kennedy said EaglePicher batteries have been on every Mars and Apollo mission, the Hubble Telescope, and International Space Station. It was EaglePicher’s batteries that brought the astronauts home in Apollo 13.
Kennedy said these large accomplishments have been possible due to graduates from the area.
“There are a lot of people here that graduated from universities in Missouri,” Kennedy said. “It is neat that we try to keep a lot of that (knowledge) here in Missouri.”
To read more about EaglePicher Technologies space projects, visit their website here.