Developing thermal testing methods for a locomotion system of a Phobos rover

In 2024, a rover will leave Earth on a daring mission to explore Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars. Phobos has a severe thermal environment, with surface temperatures ranging from -153 °C to +57 °C and an 8-hour diurnal cycle. This work focuses on validating the performance of the locomotion system of the Mars Moon eXploration (MMX) rover. Very little research is available about thermal testing mechatronic systems, hence, this work proposes new testing methods. An integrated and automated thermal vacuum test setup is presented. It is found that the locomotion system performs well on most, but not all, aspects. The contribution to the novel MMX mission is a first insight in the locomotion system performance in tough thermal environments and methods to quantify this on flight hardware. Future work on thermal testing of mechatronic systems for space may benefit from using a similar approach.
https://youtu.be/ci4f_wsmeHU Thesis presentation | http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.19058.94406/1 ESA Thermal Engineering workshop presentation on October 8, 2020 | https://github.com/HaralDev/GraphtecPython Repository link Small package for Graphtec temperature logger developed during research | https://github.com/HaralDev/HMC804x-Python Repository link Small Python package for Rohde&Schwarz power supplies, developed in this research | https://github.com/HaralDev/TUDelft_thesis_plotting Minimum working example of plots used in the thesis
Mars Moon eXploration Rover locomotion system
MMX
Aerospace Engineering