By Peter Sclafani, Staff Writer
Hillsborough High School graduate Tim Szwarc was a part of the team that built the Mars rover, named Curiosity, that landed on Mars early Monday after completing its 254-day journey from Earth.
Curiosity, the most complex Mars scientific exploration vehicle built to date, weighs almost a ton and is equipped with a drill to gather rock samples, which it will be able to analyze in its onboard science laboratory.
While studying at Cornell University, Mr. Szwarc accepted a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His co-op there allowed him to contribute to the Curiosity project, which began in 2004.
Mr. Szwarc and his team created the Curiosity’s drill, which will allow NASA to collect powdered rock samples they hope will show evidence of organic compounds and water the “fingerprints of life” to show that conditions essential for growth may have existed on the planet.
To accomplish its two-year mission, Curiosity will be climbing up a mountain in view of the rover.
”The farther up it gets on the mountain, the more layers of Martian history it will be able to study,” Mr. Szwarc said. “It is like a library of Mars history.”
Curiosity will pick up and analyze rock samples while making its journey across the Mars landscape. It was up to Mr. Szwarc and the rest of his teammates to come up with a drill design that would allow the rover to work under the Mars conditions.
According to Mr. Szwarc, drilling on Mars poses challenges a lot different from drilling on Earth.
”Between a cold and a hot day, the temperature could swing 100 degrees either way,” he said.
Such drastic swings pose a particular problem for the Mars rover as they could cause different materials on board to fail, which can break computer interfaces and instruments.
In addition to the conditions on Mars, the rover had to undergo violent launch and landing conditions before it even starts its mission.
For the teams that built Curiosity, overcoming these challenges was essential to ensuring a successful mission, Mr. Szwarc said. Keeping this in mind, his team devised a way for Curiosity to fix itself in the event the drill bit breaks.
According to Mr. Szwarc, if Curiosity slips while it is using the drill or if the drill bit gets worn down, the rover may disconnect the top of the drill, use its arm to reach for a new one and keep going without missing a beat.
The drill team at JPL still is working on calibrating the drill for use on Mars. Curiosity will begin to collect rock samples in about a month, Mr. Szwarc said.
Right now, Mr. Szwarc’s work on space drilling is still not done. For the time being, he will continue to research the thermal effects of coring and drilling in the solar system.
”What I am interested in, is, during coring or drilling operation, (is) looking at how much heat is created and what locations of the bit becomes hot,” he said.
By studying the heat generated by the drill, Mr. Szwarc will be able to identify how much pressure and speed to use on different materials so as to not alter the samples being collected.
Google computer searches for NASA skyrocketed past 1 million in the United States on Sunday, as curiosity over Curiosity peaked. Mr. Szwarc hopes the successful landing means there may be a newfound interest in the space program.
Mr. Szwarc, who graduated here in 2004, has always been interested in building, said his mother, Debbie Szwarc, who lives in Hillsborough.
”When he was 5 years old, he used to sit around building with Legos and watching science TV shows,” she recalled.
Mr. Szwarc is studying for his doctorate in aerospace engineering from Stanford University and has his eyes set on working for NASA when he is done.
Two years, maybe more, of discoveries lie ahead of Curiosity, and all of the hard work Mr. Szwarc and the teams of people who had a hand in putting the latest rover on Mars are about to pay off.
”I have always had a sense of exploration,” Mr. Szwarc said. “I still want to be an astronaut. Maybe if I was alive 250 years ago, I would have been a pioneer, but today I want to explore Mars.”

