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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."
Here
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"
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.
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.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
No registration required :
3 .h tml
o gy /space_drills_010911-1.html
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-driller-00a
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technol
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?
Humorless sig goes here.
The Earth's crust is only a few kilometres thick, so in principle they could get through to the hot mantle below. The problem is heat and pressure. First, we have no material capable of surviving in such conditions - the robot would be crushed and melted. Second, once you break through into the magma below the solid rock, it would be like popping a champagne cork - instant mini-volcano.
Geothermal power works fine on the temperature difference between the bottom and top of a mineshaft, or running off some volcanic vent like in Iceland, but until we get some really _serious_ material science done there'll be no access to the core itself.
The real purpose of these robots would be to get down through the Martian permafrost or the Europan global glacier to investigate the (warmer? wetter? life-infested??) region below...
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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!
Life is much more exciting with dyslexia.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
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)
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.
~Idarubicin
Erik Baard writes " The NY Times (reg. blah) is currently an article on robotic inchworm drills.
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Intercarve Networks, LLC
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?
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
The technology is known as Hot Dry Rock geothermal power and has been attempted in a number of places around the World. To the best of my knowledge, there are no commercial plants using the power system.
The first problem is that it doesn't get that hot that quickly under most parts of the World - say about 15 Celsius per kilometre on average. The geothermal gradient in Iceland is upwards of 50 Celsius per kilometre. So if you drilled elseswhere, you'd need a nice deep borehole. Difficult, expensive, but not impractical.
Then you'd need two wells (minimum) of sufficient diameter to accommodate plenty of water. One pipe sends cold water down to the reservoir, the second brings hot water up to the turbines.
Then you'd need to create a sizeable volume of fractured rock to provide a large area for the water to pick up heat. This can be done using hydrofracturing - essentially high pressure water, of course this gets more difficult the further down you go.
This was attempted in the 1980s at Rosemanowes in Cornwall where there were plans to build a geothermal power station using the hot granite as a heat source. A prototype plant had wells sunk to about 2km and the granite fractured. Water was extracted from the system at more than 90 Celsius - too cool for commercial power generation, but a good proof of concept.
The project ran into many problems - including the difficulty of controlling the fracturing process - ideally the fractures should run from one borehole to the other - but quite frequently nature decided not to co operate. The second problem was that the Cornish project lost huge amounts of water through other cracks and fissures - reducing the efficiency of the whole project.
Although the project succeeded in getting very hot water out of the borehole, it was closed down when the government refused to advance any more money for a full commercial plant. A crying shame really as not only would have it produced almost green power, it would have helped employment in a very run-down area. But at the time, the Thatcher government was firmly wedded to the disaster that was the British nuclear programme and was busy killing off any research into alternative power.
I think the main problem would be the economics of such a venture. Even if boring the holes could be made much cheaper, the costs of pumping water and maintaining the plant could make such a scheme impractical for all but the shallowest, hot rocks.
Best wishes,
Mike.