Spiralock Fasteners Make Descent to Saturn's Largest Moon

         After a seven-year, two billion mile journey strapped to the side of the Cassini orbiter, the Huygens probe decelerated 12,000 mph in less than two minutes, before parachuting to the frozen surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon, on January 14^th this year. Besides measuring wind, pressure, temperature, and electromagnetic fields in what scientists have called "the biggest mystery of the solar system," a microphone onboard Huygens let us hear for the first time what another world sounds like.
         While your product may not travel the equivalent of 450,000 round trips between Los Angeles and New York City as the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has in exploration of Saturn and its moons, it must function in your marketplace with minimal failure, since your brand's reputation and future sales depend on its reliability. Yet your product's underlying reliability depends on how well it is physically held together by nuts and bolts, which may loosen or fail under shock, vibration, or extreme temperature.
         For fail-safe atmospheric measurement of both Saturn from the Cassini orbiter and of Titan from the Huygens probe, several hundred bolts have had to keep vacuum-tight sealed cavities with no thread loosening or stripping, despite shock, vibration, and temperature extremes including rocket launch, atmospheric re-entry and the sub-zero chill of space. "Screws had to remain tight without opportunity for re-tightening. With conventional threading, however, screws loosened up and backed out under testing," said Dan Harpold, NASA scientist who worked on the project. "The Spiralock thread form retained a tight seal at 300° C," said Harpold. "Once torqued down properly, the screws stayed put in the threads, which helped us meet our flight schedule. To date, not one has come loose that I'm aware of." 
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