The director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory needs to be a Jedi.
Laurie Leshlin, peering at footage of a lightsaber-shaped pattern tube dropped yesterday on Mars (Dec. 21) by NASA’s Perseverance mission, joked on Twitter that there have to be a sooner method of transport dwelling the package deal, “Star Wars“-style.
“I have been holding out my hand to my pc display to see if it is going to be transported from Mars, since as director of I am fairly certain the Drive is with me, proper?” Leshlin tweeted (opens in new tab) late Thursday.
It seems that footage from the rover reveals the package deal has not but budged, however Leshlin remained optimistic. “No pleasure up to now, however I will maintain attempting,” she added.
The Perseverance mission has a mandate to assist with the bigger seek for life on Mars, by way of choosing up fascinating rocks in an historical river delta. The plan is to ship these tubes again to Earth within the 2030s, the place laboratories can get their palms on the samples to search for the signatures of life. However why a lightsaber form?
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To be honest, JPL is just not removed from the center of Los Angeles the place many a “Star Wars” movie has been produced. Not less than one Perseverance mission workforce member — methods engineer Keri Bean (opens in new tab) — has been recognized to cosplay as “Star Wars” characters alongside a customized R2-D2 robotic for charity and enjoyable, so the Drive between JPL, Mars and “Star Wars” is certainly robust. That stated, the Perseverance tube design is knowledgeable extra by engineering than science fiction.
Definitely we will level to similarities. The Perseverance pattern tube is fabricated from titanium, a metallic, which sounds akin to how Luke Skywalker described a lightsaber’s design in Star Wars #4, a canon comedian e book. Wookieepedia, a “Star Wars” fan web site, says lightsabers (opens in new tab) extra usually embrace fictional unique alloys, gems or substances like Haysian smelt, pastillion ore, or black onk. Even Cartusion whale bone has been used, as lightsabers are supposed to be adaptable to the engineer’s preferences, out there supplies and ideologies, the fan web site says.
Not like the lightsaber’s use as a weapon, nevertheless, the design of the Perseverance pattern tube was pushed by the problems of storing the tube on the floor of Mars for a couple of years earlier than transport it in a spacecraft relay again to Earth. The tubes “have to be light-weight and hardy sufficient to outlive the calls for of the spherical journey, and so clear that future scientists will likely be assured that what they’re analyzing is one hundred pc Mars,” JPL wrote in a December 2020 description (opens in new tab) of the sampling course of.
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The shiny look of the Perseverance tube comes from titanium nitride (the gold a part of the tube), naked titanium (the silver half on the smaller finish) and a white exterior alumina coating to fight solar heating; in any other case, the sun could alter the pattern chemical composition by chance because the pattern lies uncovered to solar radiation on the floor of Mars, JPL officers wrote.
The tapered finish (the tip of the “blade”, if we evaluate the tube to a lightsaber) is a airtight seal to guard the pattern from Martian environment. The “hilt” is a casing for the plunger and comes to carry the pattern in place contained in the tube.
The Martian tubes are additionally a lot smaller than the lightsabers you see on display. The 43 titanium pattern circumstances Perseverance carries with it are roughly test-tubed sized, and the pattern dropped on Mars yesterday is in regards to the form of a bit of chalk. Whereas empty, every pattern tube is lower than 2 ounces (57 grams) in mass.
The tubes and “Star Wars” lightsabers aren’t precisely alike, however we will agree they give the impression of being nearly the identical — and that the surroundings that Perseverance is at present roaming seems fairly much like Tatooine, the “Star Wars” sand dune-filled planet internet hosting a number of generations of Skywalker. Let’s simply hope Perseverance does not run into Tusken Raiders because it continues its seek for microbial life.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of “Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?” (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a e book about space medication. Comply with her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Comply with us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
