This year NASA has landed on Mars with a spacecraft known as “Curiosity” and they are conducting high-profile surveillance of the planet. We are not sure if we made any parts on the craft, as most of customers do not reveal the ultimate use of the products we machine. However we do notice some things we have in common with this endeavor. No, none of us appear to be Martians as you may be thinking! But the collaborate effort to get this craft on the planet and the very name of the craft ring a bell with us. We strive hard to work as a team every day to accomplish what may seem impossible to others. We use 5 axis milling and 6 axis cnc turning to accomplish what many shops cannot. And at the heart of our efforts is a little thing called “curiosity”! We have always been curious about what is out there to make us faster, better, and more efficient. These are two of the commonalities we have with the Mars program. Now for the real data on the “Curiosity” Mission.
Curiosity, a one-ton, six-wheeled vehicle the size of a compact car, landed inside a vast, ancient impact crater near Mars’ equator on Aug. 6 after an eight-month, 354-million-mile voyage through space. Its two-year mission is aimed at determining whether or not the planet most like Earth could have hosted microbial life. The $2.5 billion Curiosity project marks NASA’s first astrobiology mission since the Viking probes to Mars during the 1970s and the most advanced robotic science lab sent to another world.
The Mars rover Curiosity zapped a rock scientists are now calling “Coronation” on Sunday (Aug. 19) to test an instrument that measures the composition of targets hit by its powerful laser beam. The rover fired 30 laser pulses in 10 seconds at the fist-size Coronation rock in order to analyze the results. “We got a great spectrum of Coronation – lots of signal,” said Roger Wiens, lead scientist for the rover’s laser-wielding instrument at the Los Almos National Laboratory in New Mexico