To the age-old question, “Is there life on Mars?” NASA scientists have added another equally intriguing one, “Are there resources on Mars?”
Now, an international team of researchers is closing in on drilling technology that could provide answers.
Scientists, academics and engineers, led by NASA Ames Research Center, are collaborating to perfect drilling hardware and software capable of traveling millions of miles to Mars and tunneling hundreds of feet beneath the red planet’s surface to extract core samples for analysis.
NASA’s Johnson Space Center Exploration Office in Houston collaborated with Baker-Hughes Inc. to develop hardware for a system suitable for drilling on Mars and the moon. Houston-based Baker-Hughes is participating in the project under a Space Act Agreement with NASA.
Known as the Mars/Arctic Deep Drill Project, the effort also involved faculty members from Canada’s McGill University in Montreal and the University of Toronto.
Tests of the drilling technology in the high Arctic and the desert Southwest have been conducted since 2003 and more tests are scheduled in years to come.
The University of California Berkeley is also conducting laboratory research into the physics of drilling under Martian conditions of pressure, temperature and atmospheric composition. The Lunar and Planetary Institute and the University of Texas, Austin, are collaborating in various aspects of this project.
Tests in Spain
Carol Stoker, principal investigator for another Ames test in Spain, used a Honeybee Robotics drill in cooperation with Spanish researchers at the Spanish Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain to test end-to-end functionality of drilling software.
As part of the search for Mars-like conditions on earth, the three-year Marte project explored the Rio Tinto, a polluted, acidic river in Spain, for evidence of subsurface organisms and to develop expertise in drilling needed for the Mars mission. Marte is the Spanish word for Mars, and it is also an acronym for Mars Analog Rio Tinto Experiment.
Researchers drilled for core samples in the blood-red river and tested satellite links in preparation for Mars missions. The tests also offered astrobiologists a chance to look for exotic life in the Rio Tinto.
Arctic tests in Nunavut
Meanwhile, demonstrating a substantially automated, lightweight, low-power drill capable of acquiring uncontaminated core samples from tens of meters below the surface of Mars fell to the Johnson Space Center/Baker-Hughes team, according to Dr. Geoffrey Briggs, principal investigator for the project at Ames.
This team, aided by Canadian scientists, is conducting tests over three years in permafrost regions of the Canadian Arctic. The researchers completed a drill test in September 2004 on the Fosheim Peninsula of Ellesmere Island in Nunavut near the Eureka Weather Station, but a second round of Arctic tests scheduled for September had to be postponed to spring 2006.
Instead, the JSC team mounted the drill on a robotically driven two-seat rover and tele-operated it from NASA’s virtual cockpit in the back of a van, in Meteor Crater, Ariz., as part of NASA’s annual Desert Rats Expedition.
Drill may find water
The low power, low mass drilling system, which operates on power equivalent to a 100-watt light bulb, is a novel drilling approach that fulfilled two major objectives in the tests this fall, said Jeffrey George, manager of the project for Johnson Space Center.
“We showed it could work well on a rover, and we did remote-controlled drilling,” said George. JSC also acquired a core sample in the test and assessed the general performance of the drill.
“The test, limited in scope, was very successful,” said Briggs.
George said JSC researchers became interested in identifying and accessing resources on Mars and maybe the moon because they realized a discovery of water would enable space travelers to create an oxygen atmosphere, manufacture rocket fuel and grow food.
“We’re excited about how we will use the technology to explore the moon, first with robotic missions and then with humans,” he said.
“In addition to leveraging resources to travel farther into space, the drilling technology can confirm data on the ground now being collected by NASA with remote sensors,” George added.
A second permafrost field test of the drill, now planned for late April and early May 2006, will include ice and outcroppings of sandstone previously penetrated in 2004 at the Arctic drill site, about 700 miles from the North Pole, according to George.
“We will attempt to penetrate much more deeply than before when the drill remained anchored by pegs in the spud tube,” he explained.
Tests in vacuum next
Depending on logistical feasibility, the team also aims to drill into formations of the nearby Axel Heiberg Island, using the facilities of the McGill High Arctic Research Station.
Axel Heiberg may be even more analogous to ancient Mars than Ellesmere because the island has ice-covered lakes and active subsurface hydrothermal systems, George said.
The drilling system will need even more testing before it’s ready for Mars. “We need to build a third-generation prototype, test it in a vacuum, and then we will be ready to go,” George said. “We need a vacuum-capable prototype to better simulate conditions on Mars.”
Stoker’s team completed three years of field tests in September.
“We’ve never flown any kind of a robotic drill before. So, this is going to be one of those first steps of getting a system developed — a robotic system that can do drilling,” Stoker said.
Stoker estimates NASA’s drilling technology could be ready for a Mars mission in 2009.
“I think that we have brought this technology to the point where it could be considered for flight,” she said.
George said he believes a refined version of the third-generation JSC/BH drill will be ready to go, but offered no timeframe for a mission.
