This article originally appeared on August 4, 2017 at collectspace.com and is republished with permission.

Hardware from one of NASA's retired space shuttle orbiters played a critical role in the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars five years ago.

Largely unknown to the public, a helium regulator that first flew multiple times into Earth orbit as part of the propulsion system for the reusable winged spacecraft was inspected, modified, tested and then re-launched as a key component of the descent stage for the six-wheeled rover that touched down on the Red Planet on Aug. 5, 2012 (PDT or Aug. 6 EDT/GMT).

"We took part of a space shuttle and put it on Mars," said Masashi Mizukami, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., in an email interview with collectSPACE. "It was an existing off-the-shelf design that could meet nearly all of the specialized [Mars Science Laboratory] MSL requirements as is."

The repurposed hardware, which brought together a team from NASA's planetary exploration and human spaceflight programs, needed to function for the rover's landing to be successful.

"On the propulsion side, this was one of the few [possible] single point failures on the mission," said John Habis, vice president of business development at VACCO Industries, which sourced the helium regulator for the shuttle program and serviced it for its reuse on MSL. "If this unit had not of worked, there was no backup."