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The Yardney mars rover battery: Courtesy of Yardney LithionWhen NASA’s Mars rovers landed on the red planet four years ago, the world learned about a small factory in Connecticut where they make the toughest batteries in the solar system.

Now Yardney Technical Products, the power behind interplanetary space missions, is turning its attention to problems closer to home.

Yardney’s taking on the challenge of designing a battery to power hybrid electric cars.

Go looking for Yardney Technical Products, you find yourself at a surprisingly humble red brick building in the tiny town of Pawcatuck, on the Rhode Island border.

"The building is an old mill building – used to make textiles here. During World War II actually they were making propellers."

Application engineer Bill Yalen showed me around

"This filled-in depression in the floor up here as we go by, was actually where the propellor blades for the airplane propellers would swing down. They were mounted here and they’d rotate, and you had to have room for the blade to swing through."

But now, it’s been revamped to assemble some pretty futuristic technology.

"We send out for work if we need to but for the most part everything is done right here. Now this is a dry room – we’re not going to go in – see she’s wearing a mask in the back there? It’s not a biohazard situation – it’s to keep the humidity down. Now this is all lithium ion work, and literally stacking, inspecting, checking the tabs. Everything’s got be just right or it gets rejected. And that’s the kind of intense quality and reliability you need when you’re going into space, because there aren’t any service stations on Mars or in orbit."

Yardney makes several different types of batteries, but it’s become best known for its Lithium Ion technology. That’s the same kind of battery you have in your cell phone and your laptop, but these are much much tougher. Vince Yevoli is President and Chief Operating Officer of Yardney.

"The basic chemistry is very similar. We might tweak it here and there, but overall the construction of it is probably the most significant thing. Ours have to withstand different environments. Much colder than your daily temperatures on earth, you have to go down to minus 40 on Mars, also the various vibrations and shock, like on the rovers for instance they landed at 80 Gs. So an 80 G shock, your battery or cell has to withstand that kind of thing."

Yardney’s batteries are still powering the Mars rovers, four and a half years after they landed. They’re on the Phoenix Mars lander, which reached the red planet in May, and they’ll be on the next generation Mars Science Lab, slated for launch next year. Last month Yardney was selected as the battery contractor for the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the replacement for the space shuttle. Now the company is bringing some of that extra-planetary experience to bear here on earth.

"Hybrid electric vehicles – everybody’s been talking about it. It’s important to the United States and our fuel situation. What we’re trying to do is advance the state of the art of the technology."

Currently most hybrid vehicles use a nickel metal hydride battery, but developing a Lithium ion alternative is now one of the hottest areas of battery research. One US company says it has a battery that’s ready to go, and at least a dozen others are busy coming up with their own versions. The challenge is to preserve Lithium ion’s energy density, while making a battery that has a long life, and is affordable in mass production. But while Yevoli says he has some of the best minds in the business working on the research, it’s unlikely the company would be the one to actually manufacture the battery.

"We’re not a big company. For us to be in the market for a electric vehicle or hybrid electric vehicle, we’d really need to probably team with somebody, for the big three automakers to take us seriously. A lot of times they want you to build a plant before they give you a purchase order. That’s not really in our mentality."

For now, Yevoli says, he’s happy for Yardney to continue to be at the cutting edge of battery research worldwide.