Exploring Mars and Ipods

Posted by Paul A. Heckert Jun 2, 2008

The recent Phoenix lander on Mars is the first successful rocket soft landing on Mars since the Viking landers in 1976. The other intervening missions either landed inside inflated airbags or failed while landing.

Shortly after the Viking landed, I went to a talk by one of the Viking experimenters. He started the talk with a slide of a laboratory housing the equipment needed to do his experiments on Earth. The equipment filled a good sized room, consumed vast amounts of power, needed ideal conditions to function, and so forth.

The assignment from NASA was to design an instrument that could make all the same measurements, run on the equivalent of a flashlight battery, fit into a tiny package, and survive both the shock of launch and rigors of interplanetary space. Every experimenter on the Viking mission and most similar space missions has had the same assignment. Space exploration requires miniature electronics to minimize launch weight.

When I went home to relax with some music after the talk, I pulled out a 12 inch vinyl disk, containing perhaps a half dozen songs, and played it on a stereo that filled most of my living room wall. Now we can listen to music on Ipods that can store more songs than most of us have ever heard, yet are so small they are constantly in danger of being lost.

Much, but of course not all, of the early motivation to miniaturize electronic devices came from the space program's need to minimize launch weight. Once NASA learned techniques to miniaturize electronics, others applied these techniques to design music players, laptop computers and other tiny electronic marvels.

When you listen to your Ipod or use your laptop, thank the space program for getting the ball rolling.