Since 1990s Honeybee Robotics has been developing and testing surface coring drills for future planetary missions. Recently, we focused on developing a rotary-percussive core drill for the 2018 Mars Sample Return mission and in particular for the Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher, MAX-C mission. The goal of the 2018 MAX-C mission is to acquire approximately 20 cores from various rocks and outcrops on the surface of Mars. The acquired cores, 1 cm diameter and 5 cm long, would be cached for return back to Earth either in 2022 or 2024, depending which of the MSR architectures is selected. We built a testbed coring drill that was used to acquire drilling data, such as power, rate of penetration, and Weight on Bit, in various rock formations. Based on these drilling data we designed a prototype Mars Sample Return coring drill. The proposed MSR drill is an arm-mounted, standalone device, requiring no additional arm actuation once positioned and preloaded. A low mass, compact transmission internal to the housing provides all of the actuation of the tool mechanisms. The drill uses a rotary-percussive drilling approach and can acquire a 1 cm diameter and 5 cm long core in Saddleback basalt in less than 30 minutes with only ~20 N Weight on Bit and less than 100 Watt of power. The prototype MSR drill weighs approximately 5 kg1,2.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Prototype rotary percussive drill for the Mars Sample Return mission


    Contributors:
    Zacny, Kris (author) / Wilson, Jack (author) / Chu, Phil (author) / Craft, Jack (author)

    Published in:

    Publication date :

    2011-03-01


    Size :

    696899 byte





    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Rotary-Percussive Deep Drill for Planetary Applications

    Paulsen, G. / Zacny, K. / McKay, C. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2010


    A Rotary-Percussive Coring Drill for Lunar Exploration

    Quan, Q. / Tang, D. / Jiang, S. et al. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 2012


    Mars Dust Sample Return Mission

    O. Grosjean | NTIS | 1984


    Mars Sample Return Mission Options

    Gamber, R. T. / Adams, G. L. | British Library Conference Proceedings | 1992


    MARS MULTI-SAMPLE RETURN MISSION

    Shafirovich, E.Ya | Online Contents | 1995