NASA Preps Mars Underground Mole

Roland Piquepaille writes "People at NASA never cease to surprise me. Searching for water or presence of past life of Mars obviously needs drilling beneath the surface. So NASA is developing the Mars Underground Mole (MUM), based on a previous device used for the European Beagle 2 mission. But here is the twist. MUM will include sensors which were previously used to collect spectral imagery of Earth from pilotless aircrafts, especially Hawaii, according to NASA. While the Mole will stay on the surface on Mars and drill up to 5 meters deep, it will transmit data via a fiber optic cable to a digital array scanning interferometer (DASI). And the spectral images produced by the DASI will enable researchers to identify possible water, ice, organics and minerals under the surface on Mars. And this MUM will be a small one, weighing less than a kilogram for a length of only 50 centimeters. For more details and pictures about MUM, please read this overview."

Comments

What Roland Piquepaille really means & REAL LI

[Anonymous Coward]

"...please read this overview."

TRANSLATION:

...please support and increase Roland Piquepaille spam and advertising clickthrough rates.

If you really want more details and pictures about the Mars Underground Mole then you can

• read this SpaceDaily four-part article on Mars Drillers
• read the Mars Underground Mole PDF with diagrams, photos and tables
• look at a whole range of Mars-related projects from the 2003 Sixth International Conference on Mars
• read a Deutsche Welle interview with German Aerospace Center Chairman Sigmar Wittig - DLR developed the Mars Express mole that inspired the MUM project
• read a National Space Society two-part interview with Dr. Brian Glass, MUM co-investigator
• read about a MUM inspired student project or
• watch a NASA Mars Underground Mole Quicktime movie animation.

It's much better than supporting craven self-interested people who are just after advertising like Roland Piquepaille, blog spammer.

Similar, But Completely Different.

[DumbSwede]

The goal is similar, but the method is totally different. The first method was part of the cheap-better-faster mantra. The first mission would be akin to drilling for oil by hurling the oil-dereks from the sky at several hundred miles per hour The first mission involved no drilling, only the momentum of the crash to burrow some small distance underground. It was to rely on very hardened electronics to survive the crash, but no moving parts. There are electronics like this that are used in things like artillery shells that can scan the ground beneath them as they spin, and transmit a band of imagery back on rout to their target, the imagery useful for recon. So the original idea was not so outlandish, as we knew the probes could/should survive inpact, only they didn't for reasons unknown.