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Vol. 232 No. 3 |
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| NELL LUKOSAVICH, ASSOCIATE EDITOR |
Drilling to unlock the mysteries of the Red Planet
It sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie: High-tech exploration rover spends one martian year in space to prove the existence of life on Mars. But the quest to solve the mystery of the Red Planet is on target to become a reality later this year, and the equipment behind the effort comes from an industry very close to home: drilling technology.
While people have speculated about extraterrestrial life for many martian years (687 Earth days each), the quest to verify signs of life on Mars began with a series of simple images.
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Antarctica’s extreme subsurface environment provides ample ground for NASA scientists to study the conditions under which life might have formed on Mars and other planets. Photo courtesy of the NASA Astrobiology Program.
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On July 14, 1965, the world saw the first close-up photos of the planet’s surface, sent from the Mariner 4 spacecraft. For the first time ever, scientists saw that Mars—which they assumed had the nitrogen-dominated atmospheric composition of Earth—was actually nothing like Earth. With an atmosphere almost entirely of carbon dioxide, Mars seemed a desolate place with no chance of supporting any kind of life. The mystery deepened when further missions found evidence of evaporated rivers, deltas and ice.
In 2003, scientists made a startling discovery using spectrometers attached to telescopes: They identified plumes of methane gas in Mars’ atmosphere, with one plume releasing about 19,000 metric tons of methane.
The discovery of methane meant that there had to be some place beneath the surface that was warm enough for liquid water to exist. The next year, two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers discovered geological evidence that liquid water had indeed existed long ago on Mars. The next step was clear: It was time to drill down and explore what was beneath the surface.
A team, led by NASA’s Ames Research Center, set to work engineering drilling hardware and software capable of traveling through space, landing intact on Mars and tunneling hundreds of feet to extract core samples. The Mars/Arctic Deep Drill Project, which involved NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) Exploration office in Houston, oilfield services company Baker Hughes and two Canadian universities, worked to develop the next generation of drilling technology for the space mission.
US researchers, in cooperation with scientists at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, tested a Honeybee Robotics drill in the Mars-like (i.e., acidic) conditions of Spain’s polluted Rio Tinto River. Another team of JSC, Baker Hughes and Canadian researchers tested an automated low-power drill in permafrost regions of the Canadian Arctic. The team also tested the drill by mounting it on a robotically driven two-seat rover and remotely operated it from NASA’s virtual cockpit in the back of a van in Meteor Crater, Arizona, as part of NASA’s annual Desert Rats expedition.
To mimic the environmental conditions of Mars’ surface, Honeybee built an 11-ft-tall steel structure—dubbed the Mars Simulation Chamber—in a warehouse in Brooklyn, New York. The chamber is lined with canisters of coolant capable of chilling its interior to −112°F in a near-vacuum environment. Based on the chamber testing, the team designed a new rotary-percussive drill. Because the air on Mars is so thin, the drill had to be further modified with a new spring-loaded mechanism whose spring gets slowly compressed and then suddenly released to produce the hammering pressure. To stand up to the low temperatures, the team coated the drill’s internal parts with a Teflon-like anti-stick surface.
After analyzing test results, members of NASA’s IceBite team, funded by the Astrobiology Science and Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program, headed out in November 2010 to test the drills in Antarctica’s University Valley. The environment’s subsurface ice never melts, preserving a layer of dry soil beneath that is common on Mars but very rare on Earth.
The IceBite team is performing a series of tests with Honeybee’s rotary-percussive IceBreaker drill and plans to map the depth of the subsurface ice and perchlorates. Perchlorate, which was found in the soil at the Mars Phoenix landing site, lowers the freezing point of water by acting as a strong anti-freeze. If the team finds perchlorate-respiring microbes living within Antarctica’s subsurface ice, that means a viable habitat for such microbes may exist on Mars.
While the team in Antarctica continues to perform its tests, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission is scheduled to launch its Curiosity rover this fall. The rover will carry the most advanced suite of scientific instruments ever sent to Mars’ surface, including an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer that will measure the chemical composition of rocks and soils. The rover’s onboard laboratory will investigate the chemical, isotopic and mineralogical composition of Mars’ surface and near-surface geological materials, about 70 samples of soil and rock, and interpret the processes that have formed and modified the materials.
This year’s Mars exploration mission coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster in 1986, which took the lives of the seven crew members when the shuttle exploded 73 seconds after liftoff. After a 32-month halt in space exploration operations, NASA worked to establish new safety procedures and began its first of a series of space operations in 1988. The anniversary has great resonance with the offshore drilling industry, which is beginning to face the reality of life post-Macondo and taking its first steps toward recovery.
Despite several recent budget cuts and program setbacks, this year’s MSL rover mission is the most technologically advanced space operation to date. While a world apart—literally—from the offshore drilling industry, the mission stands as a reminder of the importance to always keep reaching for the stars. 
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