New Mars rover gets high-tech paint job for harsh conditions on Mars

John Campanella does all kinds of custom paint jobs in his spare time, airbrushing designs on cars, semis, motorcycles, and guitars. But by day, he works in the paint shop of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, applying paint to components for Pathfinder, Juno, Cassini, and Deep Impact, among other NASA missions.

"I think my paint is just about everywhere in the solar system," Campanella says. His team just finished painting the chassis for the Mars 2020 rover, which will be a nuclear-powered six-wheel drive machine about the size of an SUV. JPL features this under-appreciated process in a new video.

NASA/JPL-Caltech