Photo Gallery: NASA develops tire for Mars missions
David Manley
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A little over a year after the Mars Curiosity Rover landed on Mars, engineers began to notice significant wheel damage in 2013 due to the unexpectedly harsh terrain
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(NASA images, Tire Business Illustration by David Manley)
CLEVELAND While NASA s newest tire is the result of years of research and development, it was a chance meeting between old colleagues that moved it from a unique R&D project to a key piece of an upcoming mission to Mars.
The team at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland engineered a tire the Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) Spring Tire that can handle the heavy load of a lunar rover while traversing rough, rocky Martian terrain and enduring extreme temperatures.