Prototype Rotary Percussive Drill for the Mars Sample Return Mission

Since 1990s Honeybee Robotics has been developing and testing surface coring drills for future planetary missions. Recently, we focused on developing a rotary-percussive core drill for the 2018 Mars Sample Return mission and in particular for the Mars Astrobiology Explorer-Cacher, MAX-C mission. The goal of the 2018 MAX-C mission is to acquire approximately 20 cores from various rocks and outcrops on the surface of Mars. The acquired cores, 1 cm diameter and 5 cm long, would be cached for return back to Earth either in 2022 or 2024, depending which of the MSR architectures is selected. We built a testbed coring drill that was used to acquire drilling data, such as power, rate of penetration, and Weight on Bit, in various rock formations. Based on these drilling data we designed a prototype Mars Sample Return coring drill. The proposed MSR drill is an arm-mounted, stand-alone device, requiring no additional arm actuation once positioned and preloaded. A low mass, compact transmission internal to the housing provides all of the actuation of the tool mechanisms. The drill uses a rotary-percussive drilling approach and can acquire a 1cm diameter and 5 cm long core in Saddleback basalt in less than 30 minutes with only similar to 20 N Weight on Bit and less than 100 Watt of power. The prototype MSR drill weighs approximately 5 kg(1,2.)