On July 20th, 1976, the first of two spacecraft’s a part of NASA’s Viking program, known as Viking One, successfully landed on Mars and sent back images of the red planet.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration recently debuted its next, future generation Mars rover. The automated motor vehicle will be launched in 2020.
NASA revealed the rover’s distinctive design to CBS News’ Omar Villafranca when he visited the Kennedy Space Center. The celestial machine has six wheels and stands eleven feet tall, twenty-four feet long and thirteen feet wide. The Parker brothers, Shanon and Marc, invented the giant, extraterrestrial rover.
The brother’s first made their names in Hollywood. The two designed and constructed movie props. Their most remarkable creation can be spotted in the movie “Tron”; the brothers are the masterminds behind the high-tech motorcycles in the film.
However, Shanon and Marc ditched the big screen to be a part of history. Shanon designed the rover, while Marc made his brothers’ vision come to life. It took less than five months for Marc and his team to construct the automated motor vehicle.
Marc reported that “There is almost nothing on this vehicle that was not built in our shop. I mean, down to every little bracket and tab, nothing was ordered out of a catalog. We built the body, the chassis, the suspension, the wheels, the frame, the interior, the seats, the glass — everything on this vehicle had to be built completely from scratch.”
“Some of this was just for design. You know, just for it to look cool. Other things that I thought, you know, this is kind of important to have,” Shanon said.
The interior of the rover is built to seat four individuals and drives like a modern SUV. Shanon made sure to include a mock lab in the back or “truck” of the rover, so the astronauts have a designated space to properly carry out experiments; all features were methodically designed.
Marc said, “We needed a good surface area for the rock to climb over, but then we needed a lot of surface area so when you get into the sand it’s not going to sink, but it also has these vents in it so it’s not going to clog up. So it can go through really deep sand and not get stuck and not get clogged up all at the same time.”
Although the Parker brothers deliberated with astronauts and the rest of the team at NASA when constructing the machine, the rover will never be launched to Mars.
Instead, the rover’s mission is to educate future scientists, on earth, about Mars without going to space.
