Deep drilling on Mars - 0 views
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Thijs Versloot on 07 Jan 14The scientific rationale behind it is that at km-depth there could be a) water resources (which could support a biosphere) and b) understand the formation of Mars. I would argue that an efficient drilling (robot) is also valuable for possible developing underground habitation (caves) at some point. This paper mentions two drilling concepts, but we could come up with many more (bio-inspired) probably. Daniel already came up with a nice one.. microwave drilling Also, the NASA InSight probe to Mars in 2016 is using a DLR-designed 'Mole' drill that is designed to reach a depth of... 5 meters
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Thijs Versloot on 09 Jan 14In this case I was thinking more about a smaller and controlled digging effort.. not ablating a football field sized hole
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Tom Gheysens on 09 Jan 14Nice one! plenty of examples in nature for this