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Robotic Inchworm Drill for Mars, Europa
Erik Baard writes "
The NY Times (reg. blah) is currently an article on robotic inchworm drills.
NASA is funding Honeybee Robotics' R&D to create an inchworming "underground rover" based in part on a steam pipe welding machine the company built for Con Ed (called the WISER). The autonomous robot (scroll here to the Inchworm Deep Drilling System -- http://www.honeybeerobotics.com/sample.htm) would reach *kilometers* into Mars or Jupiter's moon, Europa, where scientists expect to find liquid water, and just possibly, life. Other drill designs could go perhaps a meter down. The inchworm could either gnaw its way back to the surface, or lay a series of radio relay stations ("bread crumbs") to pass the data signal to an amplifier on the surface to communicate with Earth.
Yeah, I'm a regular /.er. And yeah, the NYT online spelled my name wrong."
At least this time I hope the people will make sure that they agree on one system. We don't want another screw up becoz someone didn't know they were dealing in *miles*, ooops...../P
Here
If so, couldn't we find some way to tap into the vast thermal power at the earth's core? Or do they not go deep enough?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
http://www.honeybeerobotics.com/sample.htm
That domain name sure is easy to misinterpret... What's honeybeer anyway? (And yes, there are other ways to read it.
"I'd rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy"
gnaw its way back to the surface, or lay a series of radio relay stations
/. nytimes.com ...
I'd hope it does both, since if one fails and has no backup plan, the entire mission would be gone to waste.
PS, anyone else having trouble viewing the nytimes article? I can't believe we could actually
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When it seems that every other article about NASA is complaining about budget shortfalls for the ISS and how it is limitting its value as a research facility, I find this kind of stuff mildly aggravating. I am happy that my tax dollars are spent on space exploration, but I don't don't see much wisdom behind the way its being handled.
Robotic drills huh? looks like someone has once again "Bullshitted NASA"
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I dunno about you - but that doesn't sound like inchworm robot drills... Did I miss something in the article? I think someone mucked up copying and pasting or NYT's backend hiccuped.
New "Worm" Mining Rockets: Gerentied to be able to extract all usable minrals from 3000 cubic meters of average density rock. Using advanced tecnology based on Earth's own inch worms the rockets war head will, on impact, imediatly start burowng into the surface of the planet or planetiod of your choice.
Chack out our other fine Space Crafts based on Earth wild life: "Eagle Scout" Surveillance Drone, and "Sparky the Retrever" unmand retreval ship.
I'm not sure that this will be the best way to perform some deep drilling experiments on Europa since you will be drilling through various forms of ice. The friction of the cutting heads could melt the ice and force the robot to deal with liquids rather than solids. Since the temperature there is so cold it would be easier to have a radiothermal battery that would provide the heat to simply melt through the ice. You have your probe be heavier than water so that it will displace the liquid and melt some more. When you want to resurface, drop some ballast and melt your way back up. However, for places like Mars and many places on Earth, a self-contained drill of this sort would be very useful.
Since I was unable to read the article, I have but one question. WHo is funding this? Just when NASA is nearing its last penny it comes up with this? I guess more tax dollars will pay for this one. Why not spend some of that money exploring our own planet. There are expansive depths of the oceans that have life forms we have yet to discover, same goes for the rainforests. Why not procure some tax dollars and explore them. If we can devise a way for man, dog, and even robotic inchworms to get to space I am certain that with some ingenuity we can reach the depths of the oceans and possibly come up with the discovery of our life time.
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Sounds like an effective, though slow, way of delivering a nice amount of explosives in deeply buried bunkers. Or have I been playing too much Tiberian Sun with its underground tanks?
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
When you drill through a solid material, you generate "cuttings." Since these cuttingshave voids, their volume is greater than the orginal solid material and must be removed from the bore hole. That's why burying rodents have mounds at the entrance to their holes. How is a robotic inchworm going to remove the cuttings? Will it drag them back out of the hole to the surface? I'm sure that won't be very efficient at depths of several kilometers, because for each few inches it drills, it has to back out to the surface to dispose of the cuttings. That is why robots are not practical for drilling.
It has just been forty years since astronauts / cosmonauts were celebrities, heroes, and a rocket launch was an event. Now, astronauts are glorified tv repairmen and a launch is no longer measured by its success or the limits it breaks but by the money it wastes.
I doubt there will be a lot of surprise in what we find in exploring the Earth's oceans, comparatively speaking. The surprises that can come from the exploration of an alien planet, however, can be revolutionary.
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3 .h tml
o gy /space_drills_010911-1.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-driller-00a
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technol
Yeah guess you watched Wrath of Khan while tying to get a idea on how to mine mars, maybe they watched total recall afterwards, I guess thats what makes great ideas further expaning or re-aplying some's memes to a better extent.
What happens if this thing finds an underground cavern? How does it react?
... survive the drop?
1) Does it attempt to backup and go around?
2) Drop into the cavern
3)
4) Get back to the surface?
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track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
There was another article on slashdot that discussed the upcoming reversal of earth's magnetic field (coincidently released shortly before a movie about the reversal of earth's magnetic field). If this inchworm research progresses well then when the reversal happens we'll be ready for it and won't have to have a last minute attempt to drill to the core with unproven technology and a crew consisting of a tormented captain, a comedic sidekick, several people who end up dying and a surprizingly attractive foreign 'scientist' who ends up hooking up with the captain before he tragically dies. This way we can have an overpriced government funded inchworm that will save the day with a boring military crew with plenty of time to spare. Let's prepare for the future!
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
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Can you imagine how easy it would be to lay ethernet cable with these things ? Why if they sold one for, say 200$ it would blow all wireless networks out of the sky, and replace it with something that cannot be interfered with. Cable broken ? Put in a new one, it's only half an hour's work and $5 for 50 meter cable.
..., wires easily maintain a constant data stream of 100 mbit over 150 meters or more, and even gigabit speeds are within reach for consumers right now)
It would also be substantially faster than wireless (10 mbit ? Right
This could truly be the internet for Jack Anonymous. The free and open interconnect for everyone, free (well fixed cost of $5 every 10 years or so)
The crew is transporting this autonomous drilling device to the planet when it starts to drill holes in the ship and eventually, the people.
Erik Baard writes " The NY Times (reg. blah) is currently an article on robotic inchworm drills.
Welcome to Slashdot. Verbs are optional.
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I much preferred the robo-bartender! Can't wait for a robo-lover who doesn't talk back and does what I want. Petra
My understanding is that in the (terrestrial) drilling industry, telemetry from the bottom of a borehole is a major problem, with RF being pretty much unworkable -- I assume because of the amount of ferrous material in the borehole itself. Anybody out there who works in oil exploration care to comment?
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Didn't the monolith tell us to stay away from Europa?
let's assume we are designing one of these robots.
/.s think abt one
1.What would be its size?small as a worm or as big as a chunnel digger(the beasts that dig the tunnel between good old england and france,they were BIG as long as 2 football fields and over 6 mts in diameter)
2.what sort of power source would it use?Radio thermal?fission pack?
3.how would the guidance work?Totally Autonomous?guided?
It would be nice to know what
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I'm not sure about your energy argument. Consider the old test of the wire with two weights on either side. The wire slowly sinks through the block of ice. High pressure is a way to move through ice with little energy cost(the ice freezes again on the other side). Screwing through the ice could make sense(it's a way to create high pressure). Maybe combine it with some salt analogy. Although a teflon analogy would be more valuable(water molecules not sticking to the side).
I wonder where the energy comes from. Nuclear?
Don't you think this joke is a little redundant? It's basically the "First Post!" of spaceflight articles. :)
And he has about a dozen grammer errors or words that he just plain left out in the summary.
--French, the dead, incomprehensible language we all love.
I think you mean lyxesdia.
Good point, but I dont think this would be very hard to address. If you notice the drills that were used to dig the chunnel had a debris conveyer system. Holes in the head that fed back to a train. (there was a junk yard war episode where they delt with this very issue). Now since it works like an earth worm( earth worms leave no dirtpile) It will loosen the earth (or europa in this case) then digest it of sorts the poop it out the back just like an earth worm. This system should be designed as such that it is reversable.
you know if knowone has thought of this before I claim patent rights.
Then we drill right into the Queen alien and start a interplanitary war. Though I don't suppose 'interplanitary' works if we battle Europa.
One of Alexandr Beliaev (Russian sci-fi writer (beginning of the past century)) novels talks about the same kind of thing - the soviets wanted to build a power plant based on heat differences between the earth's surface and the heat found deep underneath the earth crust - the core. So in the novel they built a huge machine - worm, that had enough room to fit in 4 people. As usual in the soviet novels of this type, a little boy, a pioneer, borded the machine without anyone realizing this, and he only showed up when it was already too late and they could not turn back. Another easily predictable twist was that there was a traitor on bord of the worm who would do anything to harm the project (he obviously sold out to the imperial forces of the west) but these details of the plot do not matter. What is interesting was the design of the machine. It had very large drills (what a shock!) on the nose and it had small side drills and it had caterpillars on the sides. On the back it had huge stomping surfaces - legs that would compress the cuttings. So the big drills would crush the soil and the stone, the small drills would help to make more side room, the caterpillars would push the machine forward and would move some of the cuttings to the back where the stompers would compress the cuttings leaving no tunnel. Oh, there also was this little thing - they had to drug cable behind them, and the cable was used for communications and the main point was to run the cable something like 1000 kilometers underground and install a large thermo-pair in some hot cave underground and to allow the cable to be used as the transmitter of the potential. I don't remember exactly, I red it over 15 years ago but it was a neat idea I think for 1920s.
You can't handle the truth.
There have been some big flops, like the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, on which several hundred million dollars were blown.
One of Alexander Beliaev (Russian sci-fi writer (beginning of the past century)) novels talks about the same kind of thing - the soviets wanted to build a power plant based on heat differences between the earth's surface and the heat found deep underneath the earth crust - the core. So in the novel they built a huge machine - worm, that had enough room to fit in 4 people. As usual in the soviet novels of this type, a little boy, a pioneer, borded the machine without anyone realizing this, and he only showed up when it was already too late and they could not turn back. Another easily predictable twist was that there was a traitor on bord of the worm who would do anything to harm the project (he obviously sold out to the imperial forces of the west) but these details of the plot do not matter. What is interesting was the design of the machine. It had very large drills (what a shock!) on the nose and it had small side drills and it had caterpillars on the sides. On the back it had huge stomping surfaces - legs that would compress the cuttings. So the big drills would crush the soil and the stone, the small drills would help to make more side room, the caterpillars would push the machine forward and would move some of the cuttings to the back where the stompers would compress the cuttings leaving no tunnel. Oh, there also was this little thing - they had to drug cable behind them, and the cable was used for communications and the main point was to run the cable something like 1000 kilometers underground and install a large thermo-pair in some hot cave underground and to allow the cable to be used as the transmitter of the potential. I don't remember exactly, I red it over 15 years ago but it was a neat idea I think for 1920s.
You can't handle the truth.
That's it. Plain screwing. The possibility of using high pressure to locally melt the ice is an interesting way to optimize the process(how much?), but the basics is screwing. As a process it's more robust too. Don't want to be blocked by a stone
Makes me think of tornado drills in school... "All right class, when you hear the alarm, flop to the ground and wriggle around until you battery goes dead..."
Everyone just has so much great stuff to say so fast without proofing. /. format doesn't encourage reflection or delay; what's said late might as well never have been said at all. It won't be read or moderated.
/. editor (are they real? or some kind of bot?). There are a mere handful of articles each day. Shockingly, the verb-impaired submitter evidently does professional writing for the "gray lady" NYT! He didn't even spell his own name right! :P
/.r, yes.)
However, the original post was submitted without deadline pressure AND was approved by a
Shame, shame! (Hey! There no verb! I good
I admit, my usual error in haste is to substitute similar words for what I intend. Leads to misunderstandings.
Oh -- interesting article though!
and? why should this matter... so are the several hundred thousand others who come here on any kind of regular basis.
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What's "obotics"?
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
All These Worlds Are Yours, Except Europa, Attempt No Landing There
Honeybeer == Mead
The Transhab module back in the day was toted in a simmilar way. For those that don't remember the hype, TransHab was going to be a huge, house-sized inflatable living and study area to be added to the International Space Station. It or something exactly like it would have been used on future lunar or Mars missions, and it would become a piece of commodity hardware.
The F1 booster, the first SSTO launch vehicle, was scrapped too after it was made into commodity hardware to launch lunar modules into orbit for testing and deployment.
Now NASA is showing off a new piece of commodity hardware: A drilling robot that could be loaded onto two very different missions. From an engineering perspective, such a reliable piece of equipment would make sense and be considered a useful and productive way to spend taxpayers' money, right?
That's right. It'll make sense. The more sense it makes, the less likely it is that NASA will keep using it.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Maybe I have it wrong, but where is this ice supposed to go while you're drilling down 2 kilometers? I may not be thinking the right way, but here's my train of thought...
1) You drill a hole (say 1 foot diameter)
2) You are not half a mile deep
3)Now that you're "drilling," inside this tiny (diameter) hole, where do these ice-chips go? They don't evaporate, right? Won't the drill eventually become crushed and trapped in it's own hole?
Maybe they should use solar panels?
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what if it does find a habitat suitable for life, and unintentionally breaks through a natural atmosphere seal? i dont think NASA would like to be the cause of exterminating an entire extraterrestrial species!
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