Roaming Around Mars

Crane Electric Aircraft – Seattle jaunt

Innovative, cutting-edge solutions support the next era of excellence in aerospace

BY BRYAN CORLISS

All of us are ready for a road trip after the long Covid lockdowns, but one Snohomish County company is taking it farther than most:

As in, Mars.

NASA’s Perseverance rover is roaming around Mars today because of DC-DC power converters and electromagnetic interference filters provided by Crane Aerospace & Electronics of Lynnwood.

The 20 converters Crane supplied “provided a very accurate and highly regulated power source” to the highly sensitive systems on board the rover, said Joseph Mundinger, the vice president and general manager of Crane’s Modular Power division.

The converters are finely tuned to provide a precise and steady flow of power to Perseverance’s sensitive systems as it roams across the Martian landscape, seeking signs of ancient microbial life and collecting rocks to be returned to Earth by a future mission. (The electro-magnetic interference filters eliminate low-frequency noise.)

At the same time, the systems have to withstand the harsh extremes the rover experienced during its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, its 293 million-mile flight through open space and the 687 Earth days it will spend exploring Mars’ Jezero Crater.

Perseverance is the fourth Mars rover to use Crane components.

“We are proud to be a trusted supplier to NASA … and to contribute to the Mars Perseverance platform,” Mundinger said.

Closer to home, Crane also has been selected to provide power converters for the all-electric Alice nine-seat aircraft, which is being assembled in Arlington by Eviation.

Crane has been at its current Lynnwood site since 1967, back when the company was called ELDEC. Crane bought it in 1994.

The Lynnwood campus underwent a major expansion in 2019, when the company moved the modular power division from Redmond, a move that consolidated the headquarters and two major operating units of its aerospace and electronics division at one location.

Crane has a long history of providing components for space missions, and it boasts that its space products have never failed in the field.

A company that’s now part of Crane provided the cooling system for that Eagle lunar lander the Neil Armstrong piloted to the Moon in 1969. Today, Crane power converters and filters are onboard the International Space Station as well as the New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto in 2015, then continued on to explore objects in the distant Kuiper Belt, at the far edge of the Solar System.

Closer to home, Crane also has been selected to provide power converters for the all-electric Alice nine-seat aircraft, which is being assembled in Arlington by Eviation.

The Alice is “taking a practical approach to decarbonizing and making regional transportation green in the aviation sector,” said Eviation CEO Omer Bar-Yohay.

We appreciate the addition of the Crane power converters to the Alice aircraft.

“We’re proud to be supplying Eviation with our product,” said Hilary King, who is vice president of Crane’s sense and power systems unit.

It blazes a trail into our new world of all-electric aircraft.