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."

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[GnomeKing]

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[Simon Hibbs]

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Re:Money?!?

[Idarubicin]

Since I was unable to read the article, I have but one question. WHo is funding this?

NASA has awarded a three-year contract to Honeybee Robotics. The total bill is $750,000. That's only $250k per year. Not chump change, but really a drop in NASA's budget. There's a significant potential return on their investment. Yes, they need to focus on whatever their priorities are, but they can't keep the blinders on and ignore promising new technology that might be used on the next mission--it's like saying, "We're still getting data from Voyager, so we better not think about designing Galileo, Cassini, or any other probes."

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.

For the record, NASA does spend quite a bit of money on research projects directed at the earth. There are a lot of surveys that are only practical from orbit. Further, I agree with you--some research funds could be very well spent on investigating our forests, and there's some truly fascinating (and potentially useful) stuff in the depths of our oceans.

But--there's always a but. That sort of research isn't part of NASA's mandate. Asking why NASA doesn't direct funding to oceanic exploration is like asking the Department of the Interior to help manage the Australian Outback. If you think that NASA is spending too much on developing techniques for future planetary exploration, then write to your congresscritter and demand that the appropriate amount of funding be transferred to another research agency.

Re:Radio Relay Breadcrumbs?

[captainClassLoader]

I used to work in the field of Oilfield Services. It's a pretty tech field - Potential oilwells can be probed with just about the entire electromagnetic spectrum - There are even mini linear particle accelerators used for high energy measurements. This diagram shows a typical instrumentation string - Note that it's about 15m long. The truck that delivers this downhole will have several km of heavy armored cable to talk to this thing.

Borehole conditions can be pretty nasty - So-called HEL (Hostile Environment Logging) can take place under conditions of 15KPSI pressure and a few hundred degrees F. Tough to keep the electronics alive at that temperature, but it is done in the industry.

Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa

[staticdaze]

Pretty much correct, except for a minor nitpick. By looking at the Phase Diagram for Water and the Atmospheric Pressure on Europa (10^-6 Pa), you would only need to warm the ice to about 210 K, or -63C. That saves about half the work that you implied (but granted it'd still require some decent energy to accomplish).