Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Digging Deep With Kris Zacny and the Planetary Deep Drill

Episode Date: November 11, 2014

If there’s life on Mars, it’s probably deep beneath the surface. That’s just one reason we need a tool like Planetary Deep Drill on the red planet and other mysterious worlds around our solar system. Honeybee Robotics’ Kris Zacny introduces us to the innovative prototype.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Drilling deep beneath the surface of other worlds, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We have barely scratched the surface of Mars, and I mean that literally. As on our own planet, we're going to have to go down deeper, much deeper, to solve some of the Red Planet's greatest mysteries. Chris Zaki of Honeybee Robotics will tell us about a promising, though still very young, technology that might allow a robot to bring up ice cores that have been buried under hundreds

of meters. Bill Nye will join us from the road. He'll tell us about some of the otherworldly elements of his brand new book, Undeniable. And out at the other end of the show waits Bruce Betts with this week's What's Up, including your chance to ask the universe to say cheese. When I spoke to Emily on November 10th, she was already in Germany where the European Space Agency was preparing to launch the Philae lander from Rosetta down to Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Emily, you've just finished a press conference there in Darmstadt. Tell us, what's the latest on Rosetta? Well, the latest is that the Philae lander is ready for its landing early Wednesday morning. Let me ask a dumb question. Why is this so exciting and so

significant? Well, it's a big deal, Matt, because we've never attempted landing on a comet before. So it's a big deal and it's very scary. You know, it's going to be very difficult for this landing to succeed, but they're as ready as they're ever going to be. And the landing will happen for better or for worse early on Wednesday morning. You provided a nice preview of this in a November 5th blog entry that happens to include something that I'm very glad to see ESA has done. It's a cartoon leading up to this historic landing. You know, ESA has really done a spectacular job with their blog entries and with social

media in preparation for this landing. They have all kinds of information out there in all kinds of different formats for all kinds of different viewers. So the cartoon is wonderful for anyone to get an overview of what the journey has been to get Philae here. And by the same token, they've put out incredibly detailed timelines, which is another thing that you'll find in my blog entry. Can you say something about this spot that has been chosen for Philae to touch down on? It's probably the best spot they could have picked, but it's still fairly scary looking. It's a spot on the smaller end of the comet.

It's relatively flat with relatively few boulders, but I'm emphasizing relative because it still has steep scarps. It still has large boulders. And Philae has no steering. It's basically in free fall as it drops down to the surface. So there's no controlling where the lander lands. Hopefully it will land on a flatter spot and not on a boulder and tip over. Explain to us where you are now and why it is that you're not raising your voice very much. Well, of course, I'm in the press room. People are gathering from all over the world here to watch this really historic event, this attempt at landing on a comet.

I love actually getting together with all of the media. We're old friends from many of these events from the past. And whatever happens, it's going to be terrifying. It may turn out well, it may not, but we'll all be in it and watching it together. One last question. How soon after this landing will we know whether it's been successful or not? We should know fairly soon if it's been successful. If it hasn't, it may take a while to learn. You know, the first indication that something doesn't go well is loss of contact with a spacecraft. And that's happened enough times in the past to make me worried. And sometimes I manage to get contact back. So we'll know very quickly if things are successful. All you have to do is watch the feed

from ESA Mission Operations and look for people cheering. And watch for Emily's continuing coverage at planetary.org and also at her Twitter account. And they can find that where, Emily? E-Lachter Walla. There you go. She is in Darmstadt, Germany. And the only thing I wish is that I was there with you. Thanks so much, Emily. We'll talk to you again soon. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor and planetary evangelist at the Planetary Society, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, who is out there

promoting his new book. Undeniable evolution, the science of creation. I'm very proud of it, Matt. And you should be. Full disclosure, of course, I work for Bill, but he gave me a copy of the book when it was still just a PDF, an early uncorrected version of it. That was months ago, and I loved it then. I look forward to seeing it in hardcover. It really is. I've just got to tell you, it's really something when you see your book, one's book, in hardcover. It's really cool.

And a nice picture of you on the front, too. Yeah, that guy is—don't mess with him. That guy on the cover. He's very serious. No, but everybody, this started with this debate back in Kentucky, which started with comment I made online with an organization called BigThink, BigThink.com, talking about the importance of science literacy. And I came to realize how few people understand the fundamentals of evolution, the

basics. And as you know, I'm a mechanical engineer, mech aero, as we say. I am not a full-time evolutionary biologist, but there are some rudimentary things that I do understand pretty well. And I did my best to explain them in this book. And along with that, Matt, you read it. I go on to a nice digression about the possibility of a second genesis of life and what it would be like to find life on another world. Perhaps finding life on this world that may have originated someplace else. And it's literally under our noses or under our feet. And we just haven't gone looking for it because we haven't figured out how to ask the right evolutionary biological questions.

There are just some important ideas in evolution that we should all know just as literate citizens of society. Do you actually, as I thought I remembered, say something about, you know, the universe really is more than 12,000 light years wide? You'd have to have a way for the speed of light not to be the speed of light. If the Earth were at this extraordinarily young age, as claimed by creationists, you'd have to have a way for light from stars, pick a number, would you say 12 million light years away, to somehow get here in 6,000 years. In other words, the speed of light would have to exceed the speed of light. And near as anybody can tell, it never does. And it wouldn't matter, except we have to raise a generation of scientifically literate kids so that they can change the world, so that they can explore space and help humankind continue to move forward technologically. Thanks a lot, Matt.

He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Maybe next week we'll have the first ever landing on a comet to talk about as well. Up next, we are going to talk about the planetary deep drill, something that may actually reveal, who knows, maybe life that has evolved on some other planet. I love the

drill. Chris Acne is vice president and director of the exploration technology group at Honeybee Robotics, which describes itself as possibly the coolest robotics company you've never heard of. Though Planetary Radio listeners may remember a past conversation with Chris, I went back to Honeybee's Pasadena workshop a few days ago to learn about and see an exciting new development from the folks who have developed key hardware for missions including Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. If Planetary Deep Drill works as planned, it might someday give us access to places we have never visited, like the interior of Mars, or perhaps an ice world

like Europa or Titan. Chris, it's been a long time. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Thank you. Last time, we were talking about PlanetVac. I'm looking for a picture of it here in your conference room. I don't see it specifically, but there at least is a sample return rocket taking off from Mars. So who knows? Maybe someday that little rocket taking off with bits of the red planet to bring back to Earth, maybe those will have come from deep under the surface of Mars. I guess that's what this is all about, right? Absolutely. Our next step in planetary exploration is to go deeper. If you want to learn about a history of Earth, you have to drill down, you have to capture rock samples below the surface, or even ice samples below the surface. And deeper you go, further you go in a

history of Earth. Other bodies like Mars or Venus and so on, exactly the same. If you want to learn more about how the planet evolved, you have to go deeper below the surface. And that's our next task in this exploration. Develop a system that can penetrate not, you know, millimeters or centimeters into the subsurface, but literally kilometers, so we can capture this great science. There is a drill on Mars now, right, on Curiosity? Yes. But it doesn't go very deep. No, the Curiosity drill goes approximately, you know, five, six centimeters.

But we already learned on Curiosity that you don't really have to go deep down to actually capture very, very, you know, good quality samples. Even looking at cuttings that came out on the surface, we learned that a centimeter or two below the surface, the rock hasn't been oxidized. And that's, you know, magnificent science. Yeah, I think a phoenix too, with its little shovel. And, you know, didn't go very far down at all and found that beautiful water ice. Yeah, the phoenix too with its little shovel and and you know didn't go very far down at all and found that beautiful water ice yeah the phoenix was a very first man-made hardware that touched extraterrestrial ice it had a drill bit called the rasp that drilled obliquely into the subsurface and and

captured icy icy samples magnificent uh mission great. So I've been around oil wells most of my life, living in parts of Southern California where you see those things. And a huge operation with lots of guys, lots of roustabouts, working with those huge sections of drill. How do you possibly imagine doing this from a little robot on Mars? That's right. The space definitely makes us think twice about going deep and exploring deeper using slightly different methods that we've been used to here on Earth. We're not discussing ice drilling because that's what we're most interested in right now. The first thing that comes to mind is a melt probe, actually melting down and going below the surface. And

melt probes is not a new idea. Even NASA founded a melt probe that uses some kind of a laser and penetrate below the ice. Must take a lot of energy. Exactly. That's a big issue about melt probes. If you start doing math, you'll quickly realize that melting through ice requires somewhere around 10 to 20 kilowatts of power. If you include inefficiencies and so on, very soon you need something like maybe 30, 40 kilowatt power source. You're not going to get that from solar cells on a robot. Not solar cells. And actually, I did a math the other day. If you need, say, 20 kilowatts of electrical power, and you use RTGs, radioisotope generators,

that right now on the Curiosity rover, each of those will give you 100 watts of electrical power. You would need 200 of those systems. So the next option is maybe nuclear reactor. The space-rated nuclear reactors do not exist. Back many years ago, US had a program developing space-rated nuclear reactors. And after a couple of years, this program was canceled. Some folks did some analysis how much it would cost to build one. And we're talking about literally billions and billions of dollars and somewhere between 10 and 15 years. So what's the next option? Well, Siberian fishermen, they use hand-kept august to cut through very easily through very, very cold ice and do some ice fishing.

In the Canadian Arctic, people do exactly the same thing. And you don't need to strain yourself to cut through ice. So we realized that mechanical cutter can really easily penetrate through ice. Once we narrowed down the most efficient method. We started thinking about how to integrate this kind of mechanical drilling approach into something that could potentially scale down for drilling on extraterrestrial planets. And that's how this entire process came to be. That's our deep planetary drill system. Give us a general description just of the technology. drill system. Give us a general description just of the technology. In oil and gas, if you want to go deeper, you need to bring additional drill pipes. And with drill pipes, you can go extremely

deep. But for space exploration, the biggest challenge is a mess and complexity of putting the drill pipes together and penetrating deep down. So what we decided to do initially is to remove the drill pipes and suspend the drill at the end of a very thin tether. This tether gives the drills mechanical coupling and also sends power and data all the way to the drill and back to the lander. So now the drill is essentially this carrot dangling at the end of a wire. And deeper you go, longer wire you get. So you can clearly see that you can penetrate extreme depths without putting additional mass requirement on your spacecraft.

Our drill essentially has an anchoring system. So this long torpedo-shaped system or carrot has like shoes that are used to brace itself against a borehole. Underneath, you have the Z-stage that pushes down on the drill bit. Below that, you have electronic stage, and you have motors that spin and percuss the drill bit. Below that you have electronic stage and you have motors that spin and percuss the drill bit. Percussion is crucial because it reduces the power and forces required to drill through ice. So you're partly cracking your way through the ice. Pretty much shearing I would say. Yeah it's sort of like a between you know shearing and and cracking. This allows the ice chips to be much bigger and because

ice chips are bigger that means you you need you don't need a lot of energy to actually cut through ice well how much energy are we talking about 100 watts wow yeah so a good size light old-fashioned light bulb exactly 100 watts is a is a good ballpark. And going back to the RTG analogy with power requirement, if you need 100 watts, you'll probably need another 100 watts for running computers. Two or three of these RTGs, you can actually have a mission. And you don't need to develop new power systems. The power systems that already exist, that have been flown and tested, can be used for deep drilling on Martian polar caps, Europa, Enceladus, Titan, and so on. I think I would like to head out into your shop here at Honeybee Robotics and take a look at this. Can we do that?

Absolutely. Excellent. Let's go for it. So I think we'll take a break and come back in one minute here from Honeybee Robotics where our guest is Chris Zachney, and we will take a look at the planetary deep drill. Hope you'll stay with us. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, Director of Advocacy at the Planetary Society.

We're busy building something new, something unprecedented, a real grassroots constituency for space. We want to empower and engage the public like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space

advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS. Save our science. Thank you. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series, too.

And it's brilliant, isn't it, Matt? I hate to say it, folks, but it really is. And hilarious. See? Matt would never lie to you, would he? I really wouldn't. A new Random Space Fact video is released each Friday at youtube.com slash planetarysociety. You can subscribe to join our growing community, and you'll never miss a fact. Can I go back to my radio now?

Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We've been visiting with Chris Sackney of Honeybee Robotics, the relatively small company that has developed very big ideas and hardware for planetary exploration and science. I just finished talking with Chris in Honeybee's conference room. Now it was time to go into the shop for a look at a prototype of planetary deep drill, an innovative drill that is designed to be lowered by a tether as it chews through dirt and ice, periodically pausing to lift precious samples to the surface of whatever world it has visited. If you'd like to see Planetary Deep Drill, take a look at our show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio. As you can see, there is plenty of components laying around,

so the drill is sort of disassembled and right now we are assembling each of those components so let me start with a drill bit this is the business end of the entire system yeah that looks pretty mean yeah it looks like a porcupine as you can see plenty of extremely sharp cutters although entire bed looks like it was put in a chaos, very random, there has been quite a bit of thought that was put into it. Now, the cutters are staggered. They have a zero rake angle to cut efficiently through ice and potentially through some rocks

or icy soil if we encounter this kind of subsurface of a material. What's that made of? Cutters themselves are tungsten carbide. You're digging down, you're going down a long ways, but as you go, you've got all that debris that you're breaking up, the ice and maybe bits of rock. How are those tailings coming up out of the borehole? That's a great question.

And very often, pulling material out or getting rid of it is more difficult than cutting through the rock or ice. So in our case, this is a very first iteration of a drill. Since the drill is suspended on a wire, we drill approximately a foot at a time, and then cuttings are captured in a deeper auger section, and the entire drill is pulled out to the surface. You can travel at 2, 3, 4 meters per second, so it's pretty fast. You dump the cuttings into a container, and then you lower the drill back in a hole. into a container, and then you lower the drill back in a hole. The eyes can then be analyzed by in situ surface or land-mounted instruments,

like spectrometers. Kind of instruments that are on Curiosity right now. That's right. They're the instruments that would be really tough to scale down into the tube. Coming out every foot gives you some kind of an idea about stratigraphy because every foot you have the data point. So it's like going back in the history of the planet foot at a time. We have developed a microscope and this microscope has been scaled down to fit inside the tube and it looks at the borehole. So as we go down we can actually resolve particles as small as half a micron.

Are you able to give this drill a real world test here on this planet? Yeah, that's going to be a very fun test and also a very challenging test. Early next year it's not going to be far from Pasadena. We're going to a gypsum quarry outside Salton Sea. The goal of the test is to drill down 100 feet below the surface. And gypsum has two qualities which are similar to ice. And I want to be there. I hope I can go with you on that trip. I'm sure that there'll be video shot there as well. How do you go to an agency like NASA and say, we've got the technology. Why don't you consider putting this on an upcoming mission? That's a very good question.

Sounds like it's harder than building the drill, maybe. It is very hard because, as we discussed this before, we haven't drilled down very deep so far. The way to, I would say, to convince NASA is to do a lot of tests and show that deep drilling technology is very mature and can penetrate a number of different formations without getting stuck. So showing that the system is robust is, I would say, half of the success. So a big step toward that will be this test out near the Salton Sea sometime next year, early next year. Absolutely. This test, I think, is a crucial step in a deep exploration. This test, I think, is a crucial step in a deep exploration.

No one has really went that deep with a wireline fully robotic system. I'm sure we're going to learn a lot from this test, and the drill that's going to go to Europa on Mars will be probably very different from the drill we're going to be testing. But this is part of the exploration, and it's part of the fun. It sure is. And, Chris, I bet you could get a lot of great letters of recommendation from a bunch of planetary geologists and maybe a few biologists as well who would love to see a drill like this digging well below the surface

of one of these planets that you were just talking about. It's always fun to come here to Honeybee Robotics. Thanks a lot, Chris. Thank you. We've been talking with Chris Zachney of Honeybee Robotics, based in Pasadena, California, not far from the Planetary Society, about planetary deep drill. Bruce Betts is on the line. He is the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, and he's here to tell us about the night sky and lots of other stuff. Welcome back.

Thank you. Good to be back. We'll dive right in. What's up? to tell us about the night sky and lots of other stuff. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back. We'll dive right in. What's up? Well, if you check in the next few days, you can still catch Mercury low in the eastern horizon in the pre-dawn. And in the middle of the night, Jupiter's coming up looking super bright, high in the south in the pre-dawn, and Mars low in the southwest in the early evening looking reddish. Moving on to this week in space history, it was this week in 1969 that Apollo 12 launched the second moon landing of humans. And two years later this week, Mariner 9 became the first Mars orbiter. Was it Mariner 9 that started to show us that this planet actually was a good deal more interesting than Mariner 4 and others had led us to believe?

It was indeed. Mariner 4, 6, and 7 all were flyby missions, but they all happened to fly by the southern highlands, which, depending on where you look, looked very lunar-like. So people started to think that Mars was really heavily impact cratered, really old, and not any exotic geology. And then Mariner 9 got there in the middle of a dust storm, and as the dust cleared, they saw giant volcanoes and Valles Marineris, and suddenly this very complex, rich geologic history of Mars. They named Valles Marineris after Mariner 9. Not bad.

On to... RANOM SPACE FACT! bad. On to Random Space Fact. I should have asked Chris Zachney to do that for us, which, by the way, for anybody who wouldn't have already guessed it, you're very involved with the planetary deep drill that we just talked to Chris about on the show. I am indeed. It's a cool project. Looking forward to field testing. Which is not the random space fact for this week. It is not the random space fact in a completely different arena of space science. Most exoplanets, planets around other stars, are discovered within a thousand light years of Earth. So really long ways, but not compared to our galaxy.

Our galaxy being a hundred000 light years across. So we're really mostly discovering planets around other stars in this little bubble around us, which is only little in a relative sense. Stuff that is within the borders of the Federation. Exactly. We're looking for planets to add to the Federation. That's right. Appropriate process. Stay away from the neutral zone. All right.

On to trivia. We asked you, what constellation winds its way between Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, also known as the Big and Little Dippers? How'd we do, Matt? Lots of answers. Lots of people going for that Planetary Radio t-shirt that we are going to give this week to Eric O'Day of Malden, Massachusetts. I thought we had some other entrant from Malden, but maybe a relative. But I don't think Eric has won before. Here's his answer. He says that would be Draco the dragon.

while only the eighth brightest star in Draco was the pole star for the ancient Egyptians and will be again for whatever civilization exists on the earth in 21,000 A.D. That's what Eric had to say. Is it good enough to get him a shirt? He had me at Draco. All right, Eric, congratulations there. Just one other to mention today from Bruce Miller, who got it right and also pointed out that the Hubble Deep Field, that brilliant image from the Hubble of all those far, far away galaxies, galaxies far, far away, is near the tip of Draco's tail.

So thank you for that, Bruce. Good fact to know. All sorts of good little facts to throw in. When did the Guiana Space Center become operational? Guiana Space Center and French Guiana launch nowadays, launches ESA, Ariane, SPAS, CNES rockets. When did it become operational? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. All right.

This time you have until the 18th. That's November 18th at 8 a.m. Pacific time, to get us your answer. And here is one of the coolest prizes we've had in a while. We heard from good folks at itelescope.net, which is this worldwide network of telescopes. They have about almost 20 of these big guys and lots of trained people to run them. big guys, and lots of trained people to run them. iTelescope.net is giving us, or will give one of you, the winner of the contest this week, 200 points. And what that translates to is $200 U.S., which you can then turn around and use that account to take command of one of their telescopes and point it at anything you like in the sky, do a nice time exposure, grab some terrific images.

And there are lots of examples of these on their website at www.itelescope.net. So we are very grateful, and I suspect this is going to be a hot prize. That's pretty groovy. A whole network of different telescopes to choose from. Yeah, and some of them are, not surprisingly, in Australia, since that's where the network is based. So you'll get some Southern Hemisphere stuff, too, if you choose. It is a nonprofit, by the way, and we're happy to collaborate with them. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky,

and think about your favorite cleaning fluid. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology, the Mr. Clean in our world here on Planetary Radio. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the deep drilling members of the Society. Clear skies. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова