admin The south pole of Mars couldbe a candidate for future exploration efforts.This is also an area of interest for astrobiologists, as there couldwell be signs of ancient water andtherefore signs of ancient life–if there are any on the planet red.
But to reachthis ancient life, explorers will have to digdeep, which means digging much deeper than has ever dug on Mars before. Typical deep drilling equipment is bulky, heavy and difficult to installin remote terrain suchas the Martian SouthPole. So a team of engineers from Planet Enterprises, a spacetechnologyincubator based in Washington, developed a new deep drilling concept they call Borebots.
(NASA’sNIAC Institute for Advanced Concepts) issupporting the Borebots concept in 2021, and engineers, led by Quinn Morley and Tom Bowen, have produced a massive 96-page report ontheeffortstheir.This report details how unique Borebotis in the world of extraterrestrial drilling and how widely adopted the concept hasbeen in many other exploration contexts.
But the context for which it was designed was to search for underground water at the Martian south pole. Engineers estimate that they could collect interesting scientific data from a borehole about 50 meters deep.
Normally, drilling this deep, even on Earth, would require some kind of tether to the surface. Typically, this will include a system of pipes or rigid cables that will provide power and control to the drill bit. That means there’s a lot of hardware, most of it heavy, making space exploration expensive.
So the Planet Enterprises team found a solution: create autonomous robots capable of drilling without being attached to a base station. The robots themselves look like pieces of drill pipe. However, these are autonomous robots equipped with batteries, drills, motors and automated electronic systems, all contained in a cylindrical housing 64 mm in diameter and 1.1 meters long.
They could be deployed by a rover similar to the Perseverance rover that traveled to Mars. The rover can extend a deployment tube so that the robot descends and begins actively drilling into the surface. Since it is remotely powered, its main limitation is battery life, as using the drill to dig regolith consumes a lot of energy. However, when its battery begins to run out, it can simply apply a series of traction spikes on its side and pull up the hole it just dug.
Once the Borebot is back in the deployment tube and safe in the rover, it can be transferred to a cleaning and recharging station while another station takes its place.At this speed, the Borebot system can dig almost continuously without the need for heavy support equipment: just a Borebot unit is needed to continue chipping the rock.
Engineers have thought of many potential problems, including how to power a dead Borebot in a pit: they could be developed to power each other. And how can one make a branching drill if there’s something interesting in a particular area – using a hinge joint that allows the next Borebot to advance at a slight angle – and hope not to do disturb the climbing progress of other Borebots that decide to do the same. continue the center hole.
Plenty of interesting CAD designs and even some 3D-printed devices are described in the final report. It’s not short on math either—describing calculations from the power electronics to the torque necessary for the drill head. They also mention there was some expressed interest from The Mars Society to flesh out the concept for resource extraction, as well as an idea to potentially utilize the idea on ocean worlds.
But for now, it’s unclear if the project is undertaking the next step in development. While the paper details a clear plan to increase the Technology Readiness Level, it does not appear to have received further funding from NIAC, other any other funding source. However, the Planet Enterprises engineers haven’t let that get them down—their TitanAir concept received a NIAC Phase I award in 2023. So they’ll have plenty of time to keep working on their wildly innovative ideas.
