Any instrument to survive the trip to and operating conditions on Mars needs to be designed to withstand the most adversary conditions. NASA’s Rover Curiosity has been analyzing mineral probes on the Red Planet for years to find out whether there once was life on Mars. A piezoelectric high performance and high precision shaking mechanism was designed to sort particles drilled from rock samples and aid the Robot’s chemical analysis. The piezoelectric actuators were run 100 Billion test cycles before the trip to make sure they were tough enough. Watch the video
