Specialized technology designed in Orange County is playing a pivotal role in NASA’s roaming laboratory on Mars.
Aliso Viejo-based chipmaker Microsemi Corp. supplied the federal agency with a host of products used in the launch mission last November and for ongoing exploration of the Red Planet, while Verisurf Software Inc. in Anaheim is helping with image-recovery. And Irvine-based Futek Advanced Sensor Technology Inc. made key components on the Curiosity rover that monitor its movement and transfers data back to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena some 150 million miles away.
“We provide the communication between human and machine,” Futek Chief Executive Javad Mokhbery said.
Mokhbery, an Iran-born engineer and former Rockwell International project leader, has a history with NASA dating from 1987, a year after the Challenger Space Shuttle exploded off the central coast of Florida. He was hired by Rockwell to develop a sensor to test the external valve of the Discovery Space Shuttle that could withstand extreme temperature fluctuations.
The sensor provided critical feedback during the space shuttle launch as a malfunction could have caused another explosion. Two years later, Mokhbery established Futek with his brother Mohammad, who serves as chief financial officer.
Today, the company counts a slew of big name customers including Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin, Apple Inc. and Irvine-based drive maker Western Digital Corp. It has annual revenue of more than $20 million.
Futek developed two unique sensors aboard Curiosity. One is responsible for monitoring the rover’s drilling arm and robotic maneuvers as it retrieves sediments for analysis; the other tracks the precision and force used to drill directly into the Martian surface. Both are designed to operate continuously at temperature cycles reaching as low as -124 degrees.
Curiosity, which weighs about 2,000 pounds and is 10 feet long, touched down on Mars Aug. 6 and will traverse the Red planet for 23 months, analyzing dozens of samples drilled from rocks or scooped from the ground as it travels as far as 660 feet per day.
The goal of the $2.5 billion mission is to determine whether Mars has or could sustain microbial life forms.
Several of Microsemi’s products were used during the launch and flight to Mars and continue to support the exploratory mission on its surface. Applications include launch systems, avionics, telemetry, navigation, drive control, mission computers, cameras and other instruments.
Microsemi has millions of dollars of content on the Curiosity used for navigational and measurement purposes.
Those include relays, or electrical switches, for motor control and activating other devices and hundreds of small signal and power transistors that aid power management.
NASA
It also supplied NASA with two power subsystems loaded with chips that support space navigation and six salt-tolerant navigational systems used on the Curiosity, the delivery vehicle and the Atlas V launch rocket that sent both into space.
Microsemi acquired many of these technologies through its 2010 buy of Mountain View-based Actel Corp. for $430 million.
The acquisition strengthened Microsemi’s line of “high reliability” chips built into devices that are costly if they fail. These flash-based programmable chips that go into anti-tampering technology for the military, medical equipment and other gear deviated from the company’s chip legacy in power supply and management, said Rob Adams, vice president of corporate development.
“This is a good example of getting a lot of different parts in the same market and validates our strategy,” Adams said.
Microsemi is one of the largest chipmakers in Orange County, with $857 million in sales in 2011.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is using Verisurf software to align its towering antennas at the Army’s Fort Irwin Military Reservation in the Mohave Desert, Australia and Spain that track and recover images from Curiosity.
Recent Move
Verisurf moved this year into a 17,000-square-foot, two-story building near Imperial Highway and Riverside (91) Freeway to meet rising demand and establish what it calls the industry’s first large-scale metrology training center. Metrology is the science of measurement.
The company has grown revenue at about a 25% clip annually in recent years. It expects to see about $8 million in 2012 sales.
Verisurf employs 22 people in Anaheim, where the software is written and made and six elsewhere in sales and technical support.
The company’s software has been used by Hawthorne-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp. to measure parts and tooling for the company’s Falcon 9 rocket launch and Dragon spacecraft orbital flight.
SpaceX, founded by Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk, was awarded $3.5 billion in contracts by NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station through 2016.
