Deep Drilling and Sampling via Compact Low-Mass Rotary-Hammer Auto-Gopher

Increasingly, NASA exploration missions are including in-situ sampling tasks. The difficulties of acquiring samples have been identified by the designers of the 2007 Mars Phoenix Scout and the 2011 Mars Science Laboratory missions. In particular, it has been indicated that planetary drilling faces great challenges. The associated challenges grow significantly with the depth of drilling and it is the objective of the current study to develop an autonomous wireline rotary-percussive drill (called Auto-Gopher) that can reach a depth of several meters. In developing the Auto-Gopher efforts are made to take advantage of the hammering capabilities of the Ultrasonic/Sonic piezoelectric mechanism to fracture rocks using low preload. This mechanism was demonstrated in 2005 to reach about 2-m deep in ice at Lake Vida, Antarctica. The augmentation of the hammering by rotation of the bit having flutes provides both effective cuttings removal and faster drilling. The progress in developing the Auto-Gopher will be described and discussed in this paper.