Part 4 of 12 Parts
Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:
6. Autonomous Robotic Demonstrator for Deep Drilling (ARD3)
Quinn Morley,
Planet Enterprises in Gig Harbor, Washington
It is believed by experts that there is subglacial liquid water on Mars at a depth of about a mile in the South Polar Layered Deposits (SPLD). When Orosei et al. in 2018 published their evidence for this, it sent shockwaves through the aerospace community. Chris McKay is a Senior Scientist for the NASA Ames Research Center. He came on the Planetary Radio podcast and said, “If we’re going to do astrobiology, we need to not just see it, we need to get a piece of it, we need to get a sample of it. So I think this becomes a very strong argument for deep drilling.”
Sori & Bramson in 2019 claimed that the water there is in a liquid phase because of heat produced by volcanic activity under the crust. Analysts say that this geological formation and subglacial lake might harbor life. Prior to the publication of these discoveries, the SPLD was already considered one of the most scientifically significant formations on Mars. It was subjected to atmospheric and climactic changes dating back four billion years. This was published by Bar-Cohen in 2009.
There is no technology that can perform deep drilling on Mars. The InSight HP3 “mole” probe is currently the best technology and it was only able to penetrate a few centimeters into the Martian surface. There are no autonomous deep drilling systems currently in the NASA technology pipeline according to Zacky, 2018.
The purpose of this grant is to design an autonomous drilling system that would utilize a Perseverance-type rover as a drill rig. The rover would have to be fitted with minimal appropriate scientific instrumentation of redundancy. The ultimate drilling strategy will have to have a high level of redundancy. This drilling system does not rely on cables that trail behind the drill. Instead, self-contained robots will drive up and down the borehole autonomously. These robots have been nicknamed “borebots” and are about a yard long.
The borebots created by this project will be deployed from a tube which is moved into position by simple linear actuators on the deck of a Martian rover. Locomotion is provided by rubber tank tracks that press against the sides of the borehole. The borebots will drill about six inches into the Martian surface. Then the ice core is cut off and brought back to the surface by having the borebot drive back up the hole. A robotic arm attached to the rover will remove the borebot from the hole and transfer it into one of the service bays in the side of the rover for core sample removal and automated servicing. Once the previous borebot has been removed from the borehole, another borebot can be placed in the hole and start drilling the next ice core. About a dozen borebots could potentially be housed in service bays. Shorter bays near the back of the rover could be used to house extra coring bits and other spare parts for the borebots.
When an ice core is removed from a borebot in one of the service bays, the rover will prepare the ice core for on site analysis or cache it for later retrieval and remote analysis. It may be possible to perform some analysis on site and then cache the ice cores for more remote analysis. Preserving the integrity of the ice cores must be a top priority.
The proposed mission will be to drill sixty feet to one hundred and fifty feet deep into the SPLD using a nuclear-powered Perseverance-type Martian rover and the borebot drilling architecture. If the first planned mission is achieved in ninety days, an extended mission might be able to drill down as much as a mile. The system does not grow in complexity as greater depths are reached. Consumable scale linearly. The extended mission could take about four years and thousands of ice core samples would be extracted. The samples would be analyzed, and data acquired transmitted back to Earth. Dozens of sample ice cores could be cached during the extended mission. This study will evaluate concept feasibility, determine the range of possible borehole travel speeds, evaluate power consumption and power sources, evaluate strategies to persevere the integrity of the sample ice cores and assess the scientific instrumentation relevant to ice core analysis.