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MAY 2021 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 41 training, or if you and a handful of other col- leagues are coming together to fill an immedi- ate need with a new standard, your efforts will make a difference. IPC standards provide collective knowl- edge on best practices, lessons learned, and shared data to improve reliability of product, decrease manufacturing costs, improve time to market, and ensure the global supply chain is "speaking the same language." Summing it up, you and your company will demonstrate your support for our industry by building elec- tronics better. And when the standard your task group developed is out to market, your support will be recognized in the acknowledgements for the standard, which lists every person and their company who participated in the activity. For any questions regarding IPC standards development, send an email to answers@ipc. org. e appropriate IPC standards committee staff liaison will make sure your issues/ques- tions are addressed. SMT007 Chris Jorgensen is the IPC director of technology transfer. Caltech grad students helped JPL build a custom wind tunnel in a vacuum chamber for the Mars Inge- nuity helicopter The Ingenuity helicopter may be the first vehicle ever to fly on Mars, but Mars was not the first place it has ever flown. Before packaging it up and blasting it to the Red Planet, engineers at JPL gave the helicopter a trial run in a special wind tunnel designed with help from researchers at Caltech. To simulate flying on a planet where the atmo- sphere is 100 times thinner than Earth's, a cus- tom wind tunnel was built inside of an 85-foot-tall, 25-foot-diameter vacuum chamber at JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA. Pressure in the cham- ber was pumped down to approximate the Martian atmosphere, while an array of 441 pairs of individually controllable fans blew on the helicopter to simulate forward flight in the enclosed space. The fan array was designed and built by JPL engineers with input from Caltech's Chris Dougherty and Marcel Veismann, who are currently PhD students working with Mory Gharib, Hans W. Liepmann Pro- fessor of Aeronautics and Bioinspired Engi- neering and Booth-Kresa Leadership Chair of Caltech's Center for Autonomous Sys- tems and Technologies (CAST). Dougherty and Veismann had previously overseen design and assemblage of a similar array of 1,296 pairs of fans for the Real Weather Wind Tunnel at CAST, which opened in 2017. Their design uses off-the-shelf computer cooling fans (albeit the most powerful ones currently available). "This type of wind tunnel was particularly well suited for the intended applications, because the concept of using an array of small, cheap fans offers a space-efficient as well as cost-effective solution when compared to single-fan wind tunnels," Veis- mann says. "Furthermore, these types of fans are relatively robust and safe to operate, and the modu- larity allowed us to test how well the wall would per- form prior to building the full-scale facility." (Source: Caltech) How Do You Test a Helicopter Bound for Mars?