The number of scientists working on a space project is innumerable. Among NASA experts, its commercial, governmental and academic allies from the most recognized study houses in the world, it is difficult to find a proper name that stands out.
It is precisely in this place where the credit of kalind carpenter. This is a 41-year-old engineer who stands out not only for manufacturing the robots of the POT that go to space, but also submits himself along with his creations to the most extreme conditions on the planet to simulate the environments to which the machine is going to be subjected.
To achieve the work that Kalind Carpenter does at NASA, first of all, you have to be in excellent physical shape. And according to what the same engineer told Business Insider, during his time as a university student he forged his current athletic conditions.
Those same conditions, while on the gymnastics team, helped him understand all the ways a robot could move and balance.
Meet Kalind Carpenter, a robotics engineer at @NASAJPL, who employs his background in gymnastics to make robots that move in novel ways. Kalind helps scientists get their tools where they need to go, like with the Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot: https://t.co/IhqFUHhTCE pic.twitter.com/QPdVfOVULU
— NASA Technology (@NASA_Technology) May 7, 2019
NASA projects bearing Carpenter’s stamp
According to the aforementioned site, Carpenter worked on the Puffer mission, “a robot destined for Mars that inflates at the destination.”
“I also participated in the Ice Worm that can climb icy walls. Additionally, I helped create a robot designed to find life in the ocean on one of Saturn’s moons,” Kalind Carpenter told Business Insider.
He also lent his talent and skills to collaborate on the Perseverance, which has been on the surface of Mars for a year.
Kalind Carpenter is attached to the laboratory in Pasadena, California. This establishment executes its projects in two phases. The first is construction and the second, and more complex, is to take inventions to the most extreme environments to test them.
“I’ve sent my robots to Antarctica, I’ve mapped volcanic fissures in Hawaii, I’ve gone to Rainbow Basin and Pisgah Crater in the Mojave Desert as analogs to Mars,” explains Carpenter.
The NASA engineer says that one of the most challenging trips he made was to the glacial caves of Mount Saint Helena, in Washington, United States.
He relates that this place is so dangerous that “some of its areas are prohibited from access. On May 18, 1980, Mount Saint Helens erupted with a force 500 times greater than that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Now only a handful of glacier cave explorers and scientists visit it each year to look for signs of future eruptions.”
“While they were investigating, we went into the cave with them and tested the robots,” he added. There they tested one of the robots that will be sent deep into the oceans of one of Saturn’s moons to try to find life.
“This network of ice caves filled with vapor conduits is the closest thing to the environment that the robot will be exposed to,” Carpenter said.