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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

I've been following the wheel-wear issue with some interest. Curious what alternate wheel designs might prove more resilient under the off-road conditions found on Mars.

I'm supposing that any sort of rubber or similar material would prove prohibitively expensive in terms of mass?

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Also Emily Lakdawalla wrote up a nice article on the wheels for the Planetary Society:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/0819063...

0.75mm wheel skin thickness? check. Machined out of aluminum? check. Punctures and tears in the wheel? check.

Surprised it lasted this long. I understand weight was a concern, but surely for $2B, there's some exotic, more resilient alloy that could've been used? Or maybe just make those middle wheels 1mm thicker and eat the extra 3 1/3Kg.

There's some info and speculation here: http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/3187/curiosity-why-...

Thanks. Temperature range would definitely have an impact, and I hadn't considered that.

I was thinking something more like a silicone rubber solid tire rather than a pneumatic one. I do see mass mentioned as well.

The NASA article (referenced both in another comment here and in the SE post responses) cites landing shocks and wheel deployment specifically among mass constraints.

The wheels are much more of a challenge than I think folks expected (but this is just speculation). Interesting design box (weight vs resilience vs durability). They have all lived through the 'designed' in experiment length but one would expect that after Opportunity they would plan for a much longer activity period.

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