UW Collaboration on the Proposed NASA CAESAR Mission

How did a 375 lb. iron weight cast by students at UW-Madison and UW-Platteville help the CAESAR Mission get off the ground and become one of two finalists in a NASA proposal? If selected, CAESAR, which stands for Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return, would visit the Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet and collect a small sample of its surface material. Led by Dr. Steve Squyres, principal investigator on NASA’s Mars exploration rovers, the device could grab at least a 100-gram sample from the nucleus of the comet and deliver it back to Earth in capsules to help demonstrate how the same materials contributed to early Earth.

The UW project entailed designing a shaped weight that had a similar radius at t...