{"id":132,"date":"2013-04-19T11:50:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-19T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2013\/04\/19\/april-19th-2013-sol-250\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:28:38","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:28:38","slug":"april-19th-2013-sol-250","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/2013\/04\/19\/april-19th-2013-sol-250\/","title":{"rendered":"April 19th 2013 Sol 250"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Even though Curiosity and its robotic arm\u00a0are parked during Conjunction, the thermal control system continues to operate. Through the martian seasons (currently southern summer) Curiosity\u00a0has to survive a temperature range of -120oC to +30oC.\u00a0 The engineers who build the thermal control system (Birur et al.\u00a0<em>From Concept to Flight: An Active Fluid Loop Based Thermal Control System for Mars Science Laboratory Rover<\/em><strong> <\/strong>) identified major thermal challenges of the MSL rover including: 1. Protecting the sensitive electronics, battery, and science instruments from the extreme cold of martian nights, 2. Handling extremely limited electrical power available for the rover for surface operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The plutonium heat source RTG \u00a0generates not only ~120 W of electrical power but also about 2000 W of heat.\u00a0 The tubing that\u00a0carries pumped\u00a0fluid\u00a0from the RTG maintains temperatures above -40C so that we can operature the instruments.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even though Curiosity and its robotic arm\u00a0are parked during Conjunction, the thermal control system continues to operate. Through the martian seasons (currently southern summer) Curiosity\u00a0has to survive a temperature range of -120oC to +30oC.\u00a0 The engineers who build the thermal control system (Birur et al.\u00a0From Concept to Flight: An Active Fluid Loop Based Thermal Control [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":273,"featured_media":374,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/273"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":690,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/690"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/mars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}