World Report

Specialist clients demand motors made to exacting standards Swiss motor was used to drive the first vehicle on Mars and the same firm, Maxon Motor, has been chosen for the next exploratory visit. In the summer of next year, NASA will launch two robot rover vehicles destined for Mars.
The seven-month journey culminates in January 2004 when two landing craft touch down at two different sites on the Red Planet and each releases a vehicle which will explore the surface and send data back to earth.
The Mars Exploration Rover Project (MERP) is dramatically different from the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission. Where Pathfinder split its scientific instruments between the landing module and the rover vehicle, called Sojourner, the two MERP vehicles will carry all their instruments with them.
The MERP should settle once and for all whether Mars might support, or once supported, life. Instruments on board the vehicles will analyse different rock and soil samples and special tools will even be able to scrape away the surface to expose underlying material. Scientists will look particularly for minerals and other features indicating the past presence of water.

The two rover vehicles will have far greater mobility and range than the six-wheeled Sojourner, which weighed just 11.5kg. Nobody imagined the Pathfinder mission would last more than three months – it was originally expected to last around seven days – so there is great hope that the MERP will also prove as durable in the harsh and largely unknown Martian territory.
To withstand extremes of temperature, gravity, terrain and the 25,000kph space journey, NASA had to ensure that everything was made to exacting standards. So it chose Maxon Motor again for the micro-motors which drive the rovers’ wheels.
Maxon is a subsidiary of Interelectric Sachseln, established in 1961. Over the years Maxon has opened subsidiaries and representative offices around the world.

The Maxon micro-motor is equipped with a very high quality neodymium magnet, and at its heart is an ironless rotor system. The firm’s motors are used in a wide range of applications, including cordless cutting tools, vending machines, tachographs, precision measuring devices, office equipment, data processors, and medical and laboratory equipment, as well as in the fields of mechanical engineering, aviation and aeronautics.