Drilling down deep for ice on Mars by means of RedWater innovation. (Image credit: Honeybee Robotics)
Things are searching for digging deep on Mars. Development is palpable on how finest to draw out subsurface ice to create drinkable water, rocket fuel and other beneficial resources on the Red Planet.
Tiring down from the topside of Mars to reach readily available icy tanks is no slam dunk.
Dealing with that difficulty is the business Honeybee Robotics, which calls its method the RedWater idea.
Related: Mars ice deposits might lead the way for human expedition
Double functions
Honeybee Robotics’ ice drilling hardware for Mars incorporates coiled tubing and the “RodWell” approach. (Image credit: Honeybee Robotics)
“RedWater has actually shown to be the best architecture for deep drilling on Mars,” stated Kris Zacny, vice president of the expedition innovation group at Honeybee Robotics in Altadena, California.
Zacny stated that RedWater can serve double functions, drilling for clinical expedition and water mining. “It’s a win-win. We are at a position where this innovation can be instilled into [the] next Mars objectives,” he informed Space.com.
Current discoveries about subsurface water ice on the Red Planet mesh well with RedWater.
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Glacier ice
For many years, information collected by Mars orbiters has actually exposed that a 3rd of the Martian surface area consists of ice near the surface area, in addition to more deeply buried ice sheets.
Previously this year, observations by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express probe recommended that layers of water ice stretch numerous miles listed below ground in some locations on the world.
Contributing to the Mars ice story is this month’s report at the 55th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference of a formerly hidden volcano.
The brand-new research study hypothesizes that, below that considerably deteriorated function, glacier ice is most likely still present, maintained near the surface area in a reasonably warm equatorial area on Mars.
Related: The look for water on Mars (images)
End-to-end screening
The RedWater system goes through end-to-end screening in Honeybee Robotics’ cold chamber to replicate the super-cold conditions on Mars. (Image credit: Honeybee Robotics)
Honeybee technologists have actually just recently finished end-to-end screening of a RedWater system in the business’s cold chamber, stated Joey Palmowski, a systems engineer at the business.
That work was carried out through a NASA Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP-2) grant, Palmowski informed Space.com.
The RedWater system uses 2 tested terrestrial innovations, currently used in assistance of polar operations in both Greenland and Antarctica. They are coiled tubing that unspools from the surface area into underlying ice, and what’s called the Rodriguez Well, or “RodWell” principle.
RodWell is a technique of melting a well in subsurface ice and pumping the liquid water to the surface area.
To cut to the chase: Water ice in the type of debris-covered glaciers or ice sheets,
