Perseverance Rover touches down

NASA's Perseverance Rover is due to land on the red planet in mid February. NASA provides the 3D model designs to build the Mars Rover on its website. The official design comes in the form of STL files which allow you to 3D print all the component parts.

I spent the first 2 weeks of January working with James Ownsworth in the Peterborough Innovation Lab (iLab) learning how to use 3 different 3D printers and doing batch printing of the parts. A huge thank you to James for his patience, expertise and enthusiasm and to Allia for the use of the lab.

It was an amazing experience and I have learned some lifechanging skills in complicated fabricatioin projects. It was a real "Deep Dive" into 3D fabrication using some of the most sophisticated equipment on the market. It was a really steep but amazing learning curve.

I had to master assembling the 3D parts onto tray designs with the correct supports to enable efficient factory style production. I think I am now a pretty good Apprentice Production Engineer.

3D printing is not trivial - it takes a lot of time. Cleaning off supporting material and the final preparation and cleaning of the printed parts needs to be done carefully and accurately.

I dropped the "box of bits" outside my daughter's house and asked two of my Grandchildren (Austin and Barnaby) whether they could assemble the Rover and glue it together for me. These boys are real "lego" experts so I knew they would rise to the challenge. It only took them an hour to build it (with a little help from Dad) and by Sunday evening it was out exploring a field in Cambridgeshire. Our Persevereance Rover landed 3 weeks before the NASA mission !!

My inspiration for the project came from a BlocksCAD project that I did on a training course with the BlocksCAD development team in America - who trained me to teach my 7-12 year old students how to design and build the simplified MARS Rover (above). This is a project that I am setting for my CoderDojo students this Saturday. I might even print the best design as a prize !!

Richard Wishart 27 Jan 21