Students - Name The Mars Rovers!!!

[Kevin Watson]

Originally posted by sanddrag
One of our engineers designed the wheels for the MER rover. They are all aluminum but still have some springy action to them to simulate air filled tires. This is due to the flex of the thin spokes of the wheel. Very cool stuff. Those wheels are over $3,000 apiece!

I held one of the flight wheels, and let me tell you that they are really beautiful. Beautiful not only from an aesthetic point of view, but also from an engineering point of view. They are, in fact, so neat, that Dave took a flight-like wheel back to NASA headquarters to show it off. Maybe Dave could put it within view of the Amazing DaveCam (hint, hint) .

I have a pretty good idea what It costs to build flight hardware here at JPL, and I think that the cost of each wheel was much higher than $3,000. My guess at the cost of the materials plus cost of the machining would bring the cost to over $15,000 each. Of course, the Engineering time plus the milling machine setup costs are substantial, but spread across the cost of all the wheels made. I'll bet that the $3,000 was the cost of the void-less hunk of aluminum that they're cut from .

-Kevin

Edited to clean-up my icky grammer -RKW