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Aug. 10, 2012
Building for Mars... Sometimes Painful, Always Glorious
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Engineers Mike Passaretti and Lee Carlson give us a tour of Honeybee Robotics, a lab that built parts for Curiosity. Mike and Lee spent the last eight years, on and off, designing, building and testing a device called the Sample Manipulation System, a carousel that shuttles samples the rover collects to science stations. It's a central component of Curiosity's toolkit for analyzing Martian dirt and rock -- Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM). What's it like to build something that ends up on another planet? Intense.
Additional video/images: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Honeybee Robotics music: YACHT
FEATURED READING
Brilliant Blunders
by Mario Livio
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