Pawcatuck firm's battery powers rover Curiosity
Stonington — Two years ago, Yardney Technical Products engineers had to start from
scratch and design a brand-new battery that would pack twice the power of its previous
products for a boldly conceived NASA mission to Mars.
The privately owned Pawcatuck company with 150 employees celebrated the success of its
new battery Monday morning, a few hours after it helped guide the Mars rover, Curiosity, to
a safe landing. About 50 people at Yardney's nondescript building off Mechanic Street
gathered around a large cake to celebrate the key event in the $2.5 billion Mars project
powered by two of the company's lithium-ion batteries.
"This really is an achievement for the whole company," Frank Puglia, director of research
and development for Yardney and project manager for the company's Mars mission, said
before cutting into the cake decorated with a battery image.
The Mars project came to a critical juncture Monday during a seven-minute maneuver into
the planet's atmosphere that led to a precise landing of the car-sized rover within a crater.
The unmanned rover's relatively large size required a novel "sky crane" approach that used
eight rockets and a cable to bring the space laboratory gently to the Martian surface.
Robert Gitzendanner, executive director of lithium engineering for Yardney, said the
company's batteries must have performed well under the extreme conditions imposed by a
Mars landing to have been able to send photos back from the planet only minutes after the
rover's landing.
Puglia, wearing a dark blue Mars Science Laboratory shirt, said, "It was a four-year effort to
get the batteries designed. It's nice to get that payoff."
Yardney batteries enabled Curiosity to send the first photos back from Mars after the craft
landed at about 1:30 a.m. Monday. The batteries also provided the power during a series of
76 so-called "pyrotechnic events" that allowed NASA to deploy a supersonic parachute
system and heat shields used during the landing process.
About half of Yardney's employees were involved in the project.
Puglia said Yardney originally designed a battery for a Mars mission scheduled for a 2010
landing, but the voyage was delayed as other contractors struggled with some of the
technical specifications. The current mission required a battery that could fit into a
predefined space but with a significant step-up in power.
"In terms of energy, it has about four times what a car battery has and about half the
weight," Puglia said.
The 28-volt batteries are placed within a solid piece of aircraft-grade aluminum designed to
insulate them from the impact of space takeoffs and landings.
"The batteries go through a lot of temperature extremes, shakes and shocks," said
Gitzendanner.
Yardney's lithium-ion product is recharged by a 95-watt nuclear-powered battery that has
been getting a lot of notice. But the radioisotope power system doesn't provide enough
power to do more than illuminate one lightbulb, while the Yardney batteries will be running
all the complicated Mars rover maneuvers, including movements of robotic arms used to
probe the planet.
Though only two Yardney batteries are aboard Curiosity, the entire Mars mission used 18 of
the company's products. Ten Yardney batteries helped propel Curiosity into space on an
Atlas V booster rocket.
Yardney batteries have been used on two other trips to Mars, and the company's
relationship with NASA dates back to its first Apollo missions of the 1960s. In addition,
Yardney hopes to be part of NASA's next mission to build the Orion Crew Exploration
Vehicle, a successor to the now-defunct space shuttle program.
An unmanned CEV flight is expected in 2014, followed three years later by the first trip with
astronauts aboard. A planned destination for the spacecraft is unknown, but one possibility
is for Orion to attempt a rendezvous with an asteroid, in anticipation of possibly mining
these orbiting masses for industrial metals such as platinum and ruthenium.
The new mission will require batteries with the same power as NASA has aboard Curiosity
but at about half the size. Yardney officials said they believe their lithium-ion batteries can
fill the bill with some tweaks to the design.
"Without better batteries, these space-exploration missions are not viable," Gitzendanner
said.
But Gitzendanner pointed out that reducing the size of a battery while retaining its power
potential isn't easy in a chemistry-related field. Moore's law, which relates to the doubling of
electronic devices' capacity every two years, doesn't apply to batteries, he said.
The next doubling of a battery's capacity is likely to be five years down the road, added
Puglia. Yardney, which specializes in custom projects for the government, has been working
on a new "lithium-air" concept that uses oxygen to boost battery power, but the design
won't be ready for commercial application for several years.
Yardney, which is in the midst of a move to new headquarters in East Greenwich, R.I., has
been making batteries for military and space applications since the 1940s. Yardney's
relationship with NASA has propelled the small company into the public eye, but it accounts
for only about 20 percent of the firm's business, while another 60 percent is for Air Force
contracts involving everything from B2 bombers to satellites to experimental vehicles.
Puglia pointed out that the success of the Mars mission has been built upon Yardney
projects that date to the 1990s and even earlier.
"The quality of every step is what makes this work," he said.
l.howard@theday.com