Robotic Inchworm Drill for Mars, Europa 134
Erik Baard writes "
The NY Times (reg. blah) is currently an article on robotic inchworm drills.
NASA is funding Honeybee Robotics' R&D to create an inchworming "underground rover" based in part on a steam pipe welding machine the company built for Con Ed (called the WISER). The autonomous robot (scroll here to the Inchworm Deep Drilling System -- http://www.honeybeerobotics.com/sample.htm) would reach *kilometers* into Mars or Jupiter's moon, Europa, where scientists expect to find liquid water, and just possibly, life. Other drill designs could go perhaps a meter down. The inchworm could either gnaw its way back to the surface, or lay a series of radio relay stations ("bread crumbs") to pass the data signal to an amplifier on the surface to communicate with Earth.
Yeah, I'm a regular /.er. And yeah, the NYT online spelled my name wrong."
Hmm... (Score:1, Funny)
At least this time I hope the people will make sure that they agree on one system. We don't want another screw up becoz someone didn't know they were dealing in *miles*, ooops...../P
No reg link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No reg link (Score:1)
Re:No reg link (Score:1)
it does:
Welcome to The New York Times on the Web!
For full access to our site, please complete this simple registration form.
maybe you've already got the NYT reg cookie set on your browser?
Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:2, Interesting)
If so, couldn't we find some way to tap into the vast thermal power at the earth's core? Or do they not go deep enough?
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:5, Interesting)
The technology is known as Hot Dry Rock geothermal power and has been attempted in a number of places around the World. To the best of my knowledge, there are no commercial plants using the power system.
The first problem is that it doesn't get that hot that quickly under most parts of the World - say about 15 Celsius per kilometre on average. The geothermal gradient in Iceland is upwards of 50 Celsius per kilometre. So if you drilled elseswhere, you'd need a nice deep borehole. Difficult, expensive, but not impractical.
Then you'd need two wells (minimum) of sufficient diameter to accommodate plenty of water. One pipe sends cold water down to the reservoir, the second brings hot water up to the turbines.
Then you'd need to create a sizeable volume of fractured rock to provide a large area for the water to pick up heat. This can be done using hydrofracturing - essentially high pressure water, of course this gets more difficult the further down you go.
This was attempted in the 1980s at Rosemanowes in Cornwall where there were plans to build a geothermal power station using the hot granite as a heat source. A prototype plant had wells sunk to about 2km and the granite fractured. Water was extracted from the system at more than 90 Celsius - too cool for commercial power generation, but a good proof of concept.
The project ran into many problems - including the difficulty of controlling the fracturing process - ideally the fractures should run from one borehole to the other - but quite frequently nature decided not to co operate. The second problem was that the Cornish project lost huge amounts of water through other cracks and fissures - reducing the efficiency of the whole project.
Although the project succeeded in getting very hot water out of the borehole, it was closed down when the government refused to advance any more money for a full commercial plant. A crying shame really as not only would have it produced almost green power, it would have helped employment in a very run-down area. But at the time, the Thatcher government was firmly wedded to the disaster that was the British nuclear programme and was busy killing off any research into alternative power.
I think the main problem would be the economics of such a venture. Even if boring the holes could be made much cheaper, the costs of pumping water and maintaining the plant could make such a scheme impractical for all but the shallowest, hot rocks.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:2)
I wonder if it was because the nuclear program was efficiently generating clean energy at an economical price?
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:2)
Not in the UK. The government admitted right at the end of the 1980s that the books had been comprehensively cooked and that nuclear power was by far the most expensive way of generating power in the UK. This revelation killed off a major PWR programme that would have erected six new reactors to wean Britain off of coal-fired generation.
There were a number of problems - the country was still obsessed with reprocessing fuel to recover plutonium, when it would have been cheaper and safer to bury spent fuel, the Advanced Gas Reactors had come in late, underpowered and unreliable - putting their cost up by an order of magnitude and finally the government had decided to privatise the industry.
Since no one would touch it with a bargepole, the British programme was split into three. British Nuclear Fuels would remain state-owned and be in charge of manufacturing, reprocessing and storing fuel. Magnox would run the older Magnox stations which were coming near the end of their lives (ironically they were actually profitable). Magnox was eventually folded into BNFL and remains state-owned.
The debugged AGRs and the single PWR at Sizewell B were eventually sold off as British Energy. The whole thing stank as the state took on the entire burden of decommissioning the reactors when their lives expire. People made a short term killing on BE, but recently the company has foundered and is essentially bankrupt. No one knows what will happen next, the EU is refusing a bailout by the government, so its possible that part of the industry will have to come back into state ownership.
I've no problem with nuclear power per say, but the British programme has been a nightmare and should never have been allowed to get into the state it is nowadays. Had the Thatcher government confronted some of the well-known problems earlier, it wouldn't be in the mess it is. We urgently need to diversify our power generation supply - which is dangerously reliant on the rapidly depleting North Sea and it is quite clear that the privatised market can't deliver a long term solution.
But since power generation isn't 'sexy', the government appears to be doing nothing.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:1)
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Earth's crust is only a few kilometres thick, so in principle they could get through to the hot mantle below. The problem is heat and pressure. First, we have no material capable of surviving in such conditions - the robot would be crushed and melted. Second, once you break through into the magma below the solid rock, it would be like popping a champagne cork - instant mini-volcano.
Geothermal power works fine on the temperature difference between the bottom and top of a mineshaft, or running off some volcanic vent like in Iceland, but until we get some really _serious_ material science done there'll be no access to the core itself.
The real purpose of these robots would be to get down through the Martian permafrost or the Europan global glacier to investigate the (warmer? wetter? life-infested??) region below...
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:3, Interesting)
1) magma is the SAME material as the earth's crust, which is the same material as a pile of mud in the street. It's just a bit hotter.
2) the would be no "popping" involved. The material above lava is rock under enourmous pressure. Your shaft would collapse on your drill before it would even reach magma and thereby instantly re-"corking" the champagne (not to mention more than probably cutting your drill's power cord)
3) We have a lot of material capable of surviving those conditions, It is a much bigger problem to stabilize the shaft. There have been a LOT of accidents because we were not capable of stabilizing a shaft of 300-800 meters (mine elevators getting crushed etc), we most defineately cannot stabilize a shaft of 10-20 kilometers deep, and don't even dream about a shaft in molten rock
1920s Russian novel by Alexander Beliaev (Score:2)
Re:1920s Russian novel by Alexander Beliaev (Score:1)
And it's even on-topic, since the book is about planetary exploration. More or less. One of the weirdest books I've ever read.
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:1)
Re:Are any of these robots operational on Earth? (Score:1)
Scientists actually think there's life in Europe? What do we pay these people for?...
Oh, Europa. Sorry. My bad.
honeybeer obotics? (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.honeybeerobotics.com/sample.htm
That domain name sure is easy to misinterpret... What's honeybeer anyway? (And yes, there are other ways to read it.
Re:honeybeer obotics? (Score:1)
The original Oregon honey beer [portlandbrew.com]
Honey beer recipe [btinternet.com]
Re:honeybeer obotics? (Score:2)
Mead [circus.com], perhaps?
Re:honeybeer obotics? (Score:1)
-Nano.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:honeybeer obotics? (Score:2)
Immuno The Rapist.com????
Naughty
Hopefully both retrieval methods (Score:2)
I'd hope it does both, since if one fails and has no backup plan, the entire mission would be gone to waste.
PS, anyone else having trouble viewing the nytimes article? I can't believe we could actually
Re:Hopefully both retrieval methods (Score:1)
I don't think it is a waste to bury a few kilograms of earth material a few kilometers deep into a foriegn body. There is something so very geeky yet sexual about that.
Re:Hopefully both retrieval methods (Score:2)
As with most computing applications, the biggest loss isn't the hardware, it's the data. To send the data back to earth, you either need a relay system to get the signal back to the surface to be transmitted, or the robot itself must return to the surface to transmit the data. If they choose to have it climb back out to send home the data, but it gets stuck and has no backup plan, the mission is a failure.
Re:Hopefully both retrieval methods (Score:2)
Why do you think you have to log in to see the articles? It's protection from being slashdotted.
Re:Hopefully both retrieval methods (Score:2)
Why do you think you have to log in to see the articles? It's protection from being slashdotted.
(sorry, going a little OT here...)
First of all, the login page is still off of the nytimes.com webserver, so unless registration prevents people from clicking the link at all, the same number of requests will be hitting the nytimes server as if it didn't have registration. Well, actually double, since we're all going through a registration page AND the article page.
In any case, I do have a login, but I can't even bring up their home page http://www.nytimes.com/ [nytimes.com], nor the no-registration link someone provided.
Maybe it's just my connection, though, although I can still visit any other website.
Re:Hopefully both retrieval methods (Score:2)
I imagine they have a sturdy server setup, for when NEWS breaks!
Re:Hopefully both retrieval methods (Score:2)
It was meant to be funny. Sorry if it didn't come across that way.
I know that the login requests would hit the server, and that the hit rate would be no different than if they didn't have the registration... from a technical point of view.
However, there are plenty of people (me among them) that simply won't bother to go to the site because of the registration. Whether it's laziness, or security hypersensitivity, the registration part of that site does "block" traffic from slashdot users.
Can you imagine the traffic the NYTimes site would get from here if they didn't have the registration? Consider all the complaints about it.
Lack of fiscal focus at NASA (Score:3, Interesting)
Robotic drills huh? looks like someone has once again "Bullshitted NASA" [imdb.com]
Re:Lack of fiscal focus at NASA (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't have to work with conduit, do you?
For those of us with a clue this is insanely great stuff. Think about it, take one of these, modify it to lay tape (that, btw, being the flat cord one pulls through conduit to later pull in the cable) and spray in a coat of high-strength concrete behind it, making instant channel and and for once putting a below-ground line across a corporate campus is no big deal.
I've been expecting these for years and will predict here that within ten years every major urban area will have places that rent these puppies by the day. It will be a hell of a lot cheaper then having to pay some crew of halfwits to dig a trench, pour concrete or lay pipe, put in the cable, put the dirt back, and then have to resod.
Guaranteed that within ten years every organization that does lots of suburban facilities work, from the telcos to McDonalds will be using these things as much as lawyers use Federal Express. Not only that, but like FedEx, they''ll wonder how they ever worked without them.
Oh, btw, have I mentioned what a HUGE difference this will make for techies building homes in out-of-the way places? Bought a chunk of land with no phone/cable/sewer for half a mile? If you can get the right of-way, it's just not gonna matter that much anymore.
NASA: 10
dimwitted, Proxmire-esque naysayers: zip.
Rustin
Re:Lack of fiscal focus at NASA (Score:2)
Re:Lack of fiscal focus at NASA (Score:2)
I mean, don't you think exploring Mars and Europa is part of NASA's mandate? Or are you just trolling?
Copy and Pase Gone Bad? (Score:3, Funny)
Got an interest in changing your town's name? The California Milk Processor Board, which is behind the "Got Milk?" advertising campaign, wants to rename a small town in California.
Last month, it wrote to the mayors of 20 of them, asking them to consider a change -- to Got Milk?, Calif. It offered to build a Got Milk? museum and to make a contribution to local schools. Only one town -- Biggs, population 1,793 -- expressed any interest. But last week, a town meeting voted it down.
I dunno about you - but that doesn't sound like inchworm robot drills... Did I miss something in the article? I think someone mucked up copying and pasting or NYT's backend hiccuped.
Re:Copy and Pase Gone Bad? (Score:1)
Re:Copy and Pase Gone Bad? (Score:2)
Re:Copy and Pase Gone Bad? (Score:1)
I like the internet...a lot.
I hate the fact that they changed the name of this town to Half.com. What were they thinking?
New "Worm" Mining Rockets (Score:1, Funny)
Chack out our other fine Space Crafts based on Earth wild life: "Eagle Scout" Surveillance Drone, and "Sparky the Retrever" unmand retreval ship.
Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep in mind that the rest of the ice in the area is still going to be at -143C. (or very near -143C, if it's immediately adjactent to the driller) So you have to supply enough heat to make up for conduction losses in order to raise the temperature.
As a home experiment, try piercing an ice cube with a soldering iron. Takes longer than you thought, doesn't it? Now imagine the ice cube to be the size of the moon, and the temperature of the ice and surrounding air was come 170 degrees colder.
The heat generated from the friction of cutting blades would be absolutely negligable at -143C.
As another home experiment, try drilling through an ice cube. It's not going to melt all that much (if at all). Now imagine the ice cube to be the size of the moon, and the temperature of the ice and surrounding air was come 170 degrees colder.
Melting may be 'simpler' in that it mas no moving parts, but drilling is by far more practical.
Anyone care to offer an estimation on the dimentions of the probe? I'll gladly work out the actual power required to melt the ice and maintain a liquid barrier around it at these temperatures.
=Smidge=
melting could work. (Score:1)
I wonder where the energy comes from. Nuclear?
Screwing! (Score:1)
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:2)
One thought.
I imagine any Europa probe is going to need an RTG to produce electricity. These use the decay of Pu238 to produce heat which then generates electricity.
Has anyone any idea how much heat one of these things produces - and would that be enough to heat the probe sufficiently so that it sinks through the ice?
Thanks,
Mike.
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:2)
So while you're right in that melting requires a lot of energy, so does drilling. Being a glacier mountaineer, I can tell you that screwing in an ice-bolt is often really heavy work.
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:1)
The pressure is going to increase fairly rapidly as you descend. So you would need increasing amounts of heat the further down you go, assuming a homogenous temperature in the ice.
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:2)
Yeah, drilling through ice sounds silly, but there's a reason.
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:3, Funny)
Gawd! That took forever! Oh, wait. Was I supposed to plug it in first?
Re:Great Idea for Mars, but maybe not Europa (Score:1)
</obligatory 2010 reference>
Money?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
Money isn't everything... (Score:4, Insightful)
It has just been forty years since astronauts / cosmonauts were celebrities, heroes, and a rocket launch was an event. Now, astronauts are glorified tv repairmen and a launch is no longer measured by its success or the limits it breaks but by the money it wastes.
I doubt there will be a lot of surprise in what we find in exploring the Earth's oceans, comparatively speaking. The surprises that can come from the exploration of an alien planet, however, can be revolutionary.
Re:Money?!? (Score:4, Informative)
NASA has awarded a three-year contract to Honeybee Robotics. The total bill is $750,000. That's only $250k per year. Not chump change, but really a drop in NASA's budget. There's a significant potential return on their investment. Yes, they need to focus on whatever their priorities are, but they can't keep the blinders on and ignore promising new technology that might be used on the next mission--it's like saying, "We're still getting data from Voyager, so we better not think about designing Galileo, Cassini, or any other probes."
Why not spend some of that money exploring our own planet. There are expansive depths of the oceans that have life forms we have yet to discover, same goes for the rainforests. Why not procure some tax dollars and explore them.
For the record, NASA does spend quite a bit of money on research projects directed at the earth. There are a lot of surveys that are only practical from orbit. Further, I agree with you--some research funds could be very well spent on investigating our forests, and there's some truly fascinating (and potentially useful) stuff in the depths of our oceans.
But--there's always a but. That sort of research isn't part of NASA's mandate. Asking why NASA doesn't direct funding to oceanic exploration is like asking the Department of the Interior to help manage the Australian Outback. If you think that NASA is spending too much on developing techniques for future planetary exploration, then write to your congresscritter and demand that the appropriate amount of funding be transferred to another research agency.
Re:Money?!? (Score:1)
Less then ten years ago you could go to Canal Street (about ten blocks south of Honeybee) and find an amazing group of tech stores, with everything from circuit boards, occilliscopes, and soldering irons to rod and sheet stock to 1920's vacuum processing equipment and Bakelite insulators.
Almost all of that is gone now because New York's culture (and government) gives no support to real techies who use things like drill presses and assembler code. While they were feeding vast piles of money into Silicon Alley and calling people working in Flash and Visual Basic "engineers", people like Honeybee have been treated like shit.
Oh, and btw, when the WTC stuff happened and all the cash was being handed out, not a dollar went to a single techie I know, despite the fact that we were among the hardest hit. When I tried to explain this to people from FEMA and the Mayor's office all that I got were blank looks and *more* blather about dot.com jobs.
So I say hell yeah! Let's see some support for tech in New York for a change. We've earned it.
-Rustin
Re:Money?!? (Score:1)
Sorry, off topic, but if anyone deserves money from the "WTC" attacks, it is the families of those who died in the Pentagon. They didn't get the 1mil government buy off that the civie families got. They got military compensation of less than 50K.
Military application (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Military application (Score:1)
Ever heard of drill cuttings? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ever heard of drill cuttings? (Score:2)
Re:Ever heard of drill cuttings? (Score:1)
Re:Ever heard of drill cuttings? (Score:1)
Not an inch worm an earth worm. !!!! (Score:2)
Good point, but I dont think this would be very hard to address. If you notice the drills that were used to dig the chunnel had a debris conveyer system. Holes in the head that fed back to a train. (there was a junk yard war episode where they delt with this very issue). Now since it works like an earth worm( earth worms leave no dirtpile) It will loosen the earth (or europa in this case) then digest it of sorts the poop it out the back just like an earth worm. This system should be designed as such that it is reversable.
you know if knowone has thought of this before I claim patent rights.
Re:Ever heard of drill cuttings? (Score:1)
I think that they have taken this into consideration.
In the article, it mentions that they had designs for both an "inchworm" welding robot and then a drilling system for exploring Mars. Then, the article says, the combined the features from both designs to make one singular design.
I have no idea what either design looked like originally, but I'm picturing some kind of base station that's above ground at the entry point that is helping with the process somehow.
I also can't help but think that one could avoid the "cuttings" volume problem by using chemical reactions on the debris. Depending on the minerals present, perhaps some could be released in a gaseous form to escape up the hole, and then others turned into a dense sludge trail up the vacated hole. The possible pollution is obvious, but the implications of that kind of pollution are unknown. I'm pretty sure it would be difficult to pollute the practically nonexistant atmosphere with gases.
Anyway, that's just my .02
Alexandr Beliaev (Score:2)
Alternative articles on this (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/mars-driller-00a
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technol
Stolen Ideas and too much trek (Score:1)
Technical question (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Does it attempt to backup and go around?
2) Drop into the cavern
3)
4) Get back to the surface?
you forgot one . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Technical question (Score:1)
Re:Technical question (Score:1)
Con Ed? (Score:1)
ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. welcom to con ed. [imdb.com]
This is a critical piece of technology! (Score:4, Funny)
Robotic Itch Worms from Mars !? (Score:4, Funny)
sexilady? (Score:1)
Earth applications (Score:4, Interesting)
It would also be substantially faster than wireless (10 mbit ? Right
This could truly be the internet for Jack Anonymous. The free and open interconnect for everyone, free (well fixed cost of $5 every 10 years or so)
Re:Earth applications (Score:5, Funny)
And who cares if the 10$-15k rental equipment gets stuck under some highway. You can always shut down traffic, bring in the back hoe, break open the pavement, cart of 1/2 ton of concrete and asphalt, and retrieve the device...
The search and retrieve operation would only cost 300k or so.
Man, what world do you people live in? Have you ever tried to get trench permits from a city? And you think arbitrary tunnels will be looked more favorable on?
The EM spectrum is natures peace offering to us to stop fucking drilling holes in her. Lets get some FCC reform, turn the entire spectrum into a shared spectrum with frequency hoping recievers and auto-relays/routers in each consumer device, and use the nearly inifinte amount of bandwidth that electricity and magnetism provide us.
-malakai
Re:Earth applications (Score:2)
I agree the comment was inane, but I also think it's safe to say that most people have never had occasion to request a trench permit. Doesn't invalidate your point, I just found it an odd thing to ask, as if it's the most ordinary thing in the world, something most people do every day.
Re:Earth applications (Score:2)
sniff (Score:4, Funny)
Welcome to Slashdot. Verbs are optional.
Re:sniff (Score:1)
Support Group for Grammar Dinosaurs (Score:2)
However, the original post was submitted without deadline pressure AND was approved by a
Shame, shame! (Hey! There no verb! I good
I admit, my usual error in haste is to substitute similar words for what I intend. Leads to misunderstandings.
Oh -- interesting article though!
Robo Inch worm (Score:1)
Radio Relay Breadcrumbs? (Score:4, Interesting)
My understanding is that in the (terrestrial) drilling industry, telemetry from the bottom of a borehole is a major problem, with RF being pretty much unworkable -- I assume because of the amount of ferrous material in the borehole itself. Anybody out there who works in oil exploration care to comment?
Re:Radio Relay Breadcrumbs? (Score:2, Informative)
Borehole conditions can be pretty nasty - So-called HEL (Hostile Environment Logging) can take place under conditions of 15KPSI pressure and a few hundred degrees F. Tough to keep the electronics alive at that temperature, but it is done in the industry.
Re:Radio Relay Breadcrumbs? (Score:1)
"The key to the new system is a unique non-contacting coupler embedded in connections between 30-foot long sections of drill pipe. The coupler permits data to be sent across the connection and on through a high-speed cable attached to the inner pipe wall."
Re:Radio Relay Breadcrumbs? (Score:3, Interesting)
I gather this is incredibly slow, however. I recall that the speeds achieved are something on the order of 24 bits/second (that's bits, not kb). I think there was an article recently (mebbe IEEE times, I can't remember right now) about actually using an acoustic system to boost data rates.
Re:Radio Relay Breadcrumbs? (Score:2)
The MONOLITH! (Score:3, Funny)
Let's get the specs down on this one (Score:1)
1.What would be its size?small as a worm or as big as a chunnel digger(the beasts that dig the tunnel between good old england and france,they were BIG as long as 2 football fields and over 6 mts in diameter)
2.what sort of power source would it use?Radio thermal?fission pack?
3.how would the guidance work?Totally Autonomous?guided?
It would be nice to know what
NASA, the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
There have been some big flops, like the Flight Telerobotic Servicer, on which several hundred million dollars were blown.
Robot Inchworm Drill? (Score:1)
Mmmmmm... (Score:1)
What's "obotics"?
They warned us to stay away from europa (Score:1)
Installable Modules and NASA (Score:2)
The F1 booster, the first SSTO launch vehicle, was scrapped too after it was made into commodity hardware to launch lunar modules into orbit for testing and deployment.
Now NASA is showing off a new piece of commodity hardware: A drilling robot that could be loaded onto two very different missions. From an engineering perspective, such a reliable piece of equipment would make sense and be considered a useful and productive way to spend taxpayers' money, right?
That's right. It'll make sense. The more sense it makes, the less likely it is that NASA will keep using it.
A question to the nerds... (Score:2)
Maybe I have it wrong, but where is this ice supposed to go while you're drilling down 2 kilometers? I may not be thinking the right way, but here's my train of thought...
1) You drill a hole (say 1 foot diameter)
2) You are not half a mile deep
3)Now that you're "drilling," inside this tiny (diameter) hole, where do these ice-chips go? They don't evaporate, right? Won't the drill eventually become crushed and trapped in it's own hole?
Power source? (Score:2)
Maybe they should use solar panels?
Last Post! (Score:1)
it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen some of it.
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Re:This would make a great movie (Score:1)