Things are looking up for digging deep on Mars. Progress is becoming tangible on how best to mine subsurface ice to generate potable water, rocket fuel and other useful resources on the Red Planet.
But boring on the upside Mars Getting to the available ice reservoirs is not easy.
Addressing this challenge is the company Honeybee robotswhich calls its approach the RedWater Concept.
Related: Icy deposits on Mars could pave the way for human exploration
Dual purposes
“RedWater has proven to be the right architecture for deep drilling on Mars,” said Chris Zacny, vice president of the Exploration Technology Group at Honeybee Robotics in Altadena, California.
RedWater could serve dual purposes, such as drilling for scientific exploration and water extraction, Zacny said. “It's a win-win. We're in a position where we can bring this technology in.” [the] Upcoming Mars missions,” he told Space.com.
Recent discoveries about subsurface water ice on the Red Planet fit well with RedWater.
Glacier ice
Over the years, data collected by Mars orbiters has revealed that a third of Mars' surface contains ice near the surface, as well as ice sheets buried deeper.
For example, earlier this year, the European Space Agency spotted Mars Express The probe indicated that layers of water ice extend several miles below the Earth's surface in some places on the planet.
In addition to the Martian ice story, there is a report this month at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held in… An unprecedented volcano.
The new research predicts that beneath this largely eroded feature, glacial ice likely still exists, preserved near the surface in a relatively warm, equatorial region on Mars.
Related: Searching for water on Mars (photos)
End-to-end testing
Meanwhile, Honeybee technicians recently completed extensive testing of the RedWater system in the company's cold room, said Joey Palmowski, a systems engineer at the company.
This work was carried out through a NASA Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP-2) grant, Palmowski told Space.com.
The RedWater system uses two proven ground-based technologies that have already been put into practice to support polar operations in both Greenland and Antarctica. They are coiled tubes that separate from the surface to the ice below, and the so-called “Rodriguez Well” or “RodWell” concept.
RodWell is a method of melting a well in subsurface ice and pumping liquid water to the surface.
To cut to the chase: Water ice in the form of debris-covered glaciers or ice sheets, perhaps hundreds of meters thick, has been discovered and mapped in the mid-latitudes of Mars. This is a good place for the future Human exploratory outpost.
Swimming team
Nathaniel Butzig is associate director and senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute's office in Lakewood, Colorado.
As co-leader of the Subsurface Water Ice Mapping (SWIM) project on Mars, Butzig and his colleagues are busy mapping the location and depth of mid-latitude ice on Mars.
They are now wrapping up the third phase of SWIM's work, which is clearly intended to help determine targeting priorities for the upcoming Mars International Ice Mapping (I-MIM) mission concept.
Ice exploration
I-MIM is a radar-carrying orbiter, a NASA project in partnership with the Italian Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and the Canadian Space Agency To develop an orbiter to explore ice on Mars.
The main goal of I-MIM is to determine the extent and volume of water ice in the mid- and low-latitude regions of the planet.
Butzig said he feels NASA and other international partners are eager to pursue this mission I-MIM mission.
However, there was a great deal of budget uncertainty regarding this endeavor, Butzig noted, certainly on the part of NASA and perhaps on the part of other agencies as well.
“This makes it difficult for international partners to finalize their agreements and begin actively designing and building mission hardware and tools,” Butzig noted.
Required: Side and vertical data
Butzig said there are uncertainties in current data sets, so more research — especially new orbital radar sounding capabilities — on Mars is needed.
Butzig added that once this information is available, it can definitively identify and characterize buried ice at landing site scales for large areas across the mid-latitudes of Mars.
“However, it is possible in principle to send landing missions to higher latitudes or to locations where new impacts have exposed ice, and confirm the encounter with ice in the subsurface using a drill without first obtaining that additional data,” Butzig said. “However, even for such sites, the lateral and vertical extent and concentration of ice will remain poorly constrained without new tools.”
Hard facts
Drilling down to 1 meter (3.3 feet) into the ice can be difficult, explained Isaac Smith, an associate professor at York University in Toronto, Ontario. He is also a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, based in Tucson, Arizona.
Such drilling into the ground requires large amounts of thermal or electrical energy and a lot of human energy. “It's especially difficult when the ice is much colder than minus 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit), like all the ice on Mars,” Smith said.
This has been found to be the case with NASA Phoenix Mars lander “The mission is in 2008,” Smith said. The stationary spacecraft landed on the planet farther north than any previous mission, at a latitude equivalent to that of northern Alaska, then scooped up Martian soil and searched for water ice, and found it.
“That ice-reinforced soil [at the Phoenix lander locale] Smith pointed out that it's really hard to dig, but anyone who lives in Canada during the winter knows not to go digging in the backyard when the ground is frozen.
Frozen in time
Carefully sampling any ice on Mars would yield a wealth of scientific revenue, Smith said.
“Polar ice could give you a detailed record of climate history; mid-latitude ice could become a resource for future space exploration and is the next frontier of research.” Life on Mars” Smith advised. Obtain rock samples “It could provide clues to the early history of Mars, while ice will give us clues to the modern history of Mars.”
That's all good news, but reaching depths of tens of meters or more is a big undertaking, Smith said. He said doing so consumes a lot of energy and requires a lot of human intervention, even on Earth Land.
“For the foreseeable future, this will have to be done by robots on Mars, perhaps over long periods, which requires additional levels of power, which adds cost, and some energy sources we don't have yet,” Smith said. “It's possible in the long term, and Honeybee Robotics might be the company to build it.”
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