Vehicle - Blog Posts

Fall 2020, 3D Fundamentals
Modeled and Textured Bus [Sketchfab Link]

Quiet Moments

You sat on the couch, a warm cup of tea in your hands, trying to focus on the movie playing in front of you. But your attention kept drifting to the man beside you. Pedro, with his easy smile and comforting presence, always seemed to draw you in, no matter how much you tried to focus on anything else.

"Hey, you okay?" Pedro asked softly, glancing at you from the corner of his eye. His voice was warm, the kind that made you feel like everything was right in the world.

You nodded, but your smile gave away the fact that you were completely distracted. He chuckled, his gaze turning affectionate.

"You've been staring at your tea for the last five minutes," he teased, nudging you with his shoulder.

You couldn’t help but laugh, the sound light and carefree. "Sorry, just... thinking."

"About?" He raised an eyebrow, genuinely curious.

You shrugged, glancing up at him with a shy smile. "Just about how lucky I am to be here with you."

Pedro’s expression softened, his warm brown eyes locking with yours. The playful teasing from before melted away into something more sincere. "You know I feel the same way, right? You’re everything I could’ve asked for."

Your heart skipped a beat at his words. There was something comforting and reassuring about the way he spoke—like he was reassuring not just you, but also himself.

He reached out and gently took your hand, his thumb brushing over your knuckles in that soothing, gentle way that had become second nature between you two. The age gap didn’t matter in these moments—when the world felt like it was at peace, and it was just the two of you, lost in each other’s presence.

"How about we focus on the movie now?" Pedro suggested, grinning once more. "But you’re still my favorite distraction."

You laughed, your heart warm. "Deal," you said, leaning into him, feeling like you’d never want to be anywhere else.

Reinventing the Wheel

Planning a trip to the Moon? Mars? You’re going to need good tires…

Exploration requires mobility. And whether you’re on Earth or as far away as the Moon or Mars, you need good tires to get your vehicle from one place to another. Our decades-long work developing tires for space exploration has led to new game-changing designs and materials. Yes, we’re reinventing the wheel—here’s why.

Wheels on the Moon

Early tire designs were focused on moving hardware and astronauts across the lunar surface. The last NASA vehicle to visit the Moon was the Lunar Roving Vehicle during our Apollo missions. The vehicle used four large flexible wire mesh wheels with stiff inner frames. We used these Apollo era tires as the inspiration for new designs using newer materials and technology to better function on a lunar surface.

Up springs a new idea

During the mid-2000s, we worked with industry partner Goodyear to develop the Spring Tire, an airless compliant tire that consists of several hundred coiled steel wires woven into a flexible mesh, giving the tires the ability to support high loads while also conforming to the terrain. The Spring Tire has been proven to generate very good traction and durability in soft sand and on rocks.

Spring Tires for Mars

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. That’s when engineers began developing new Spring Tire prototypes to determine if they would be a new and better solution for exploration rovers on Mars.

In order for Spring Tires to go the distance on Martian terrain, new materials were required. Enter nickel titanium, a shape memory alloy with amazing capabilities that allow the tire to deform down to the axle and return to its original shape.

These tires can take a lickin’

After building the shape memory alloy tire, Glenn engineers sent it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars Life Test Facility. It performed impressively on the punishing track.

Why reinvent the wheel? It’s worth it.

New, high performing tires would allow lunar and Mars rovers to explore greater regions of the surface than currently possible. They conform to the terrain and do not sink as much as rigid wheels, allowing them to carry heavier payloads for the same given mass and volume. Also, because they absorb energy from impacts at moderate to high speeds, there is potential for use on crewed exploration vehicles which are expected to move at speeds significantly higher than the current Mars rovers.

Airless tires on Earth

Maybe. Recently, engineers and materials scientists have been testing a spinoff tire version that would work on cars and trucks on Earth. Stay tuned as we continue to push the boundaries on traditional concepts for exploring our world and beyond.  

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.  

The Star Wars Air Assault Speeder. Building home made models from paper and cardboard is my forte. This vehicle will be the subject of a lot of our comic art as I put it into action on storyboards. It has two main canons, two strafing canons, two aft canons, and four proton gravity bombs. In our story Incom secretly made a number of these for a special task force. This model is almost done. I’ve got to sculpt the pilots from supersculpy and finish the stand as well as cockpit and underbody.

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