The tether management system will deploy, operate, and retract the drill and its instruments up to a depth of 10 m.
MDA Alliance delivers a tether management system for NASA's future mars drill instrument
Pasadena, CA– MDA Alliance has delivered a prototype of a tether-reel mechanism for an instrumented borehole drill that may be used on NASA’s future mission to the icy northern plains region of Mars.
The prototype builds on Alliance’s distinguished history of providing first-class flight hardware; the company has thus far provided three robotic arms for NASA’s other history-making Mars rovers and landers and is currently working on the most complex arm to date for the Mars Science Laboratory mission.
The tether reel mechanism was delivered August 3rd to NASA’s Ames Research Center (ARC) in Moffett Field, CA. ARC manages the IPP project known as “ICE-AX” and is developing the drill. The drill would be an integral component on a future mission to Mars, where drilling into ice-rich soil may reveal evidence of past life forms on the red planet.
ADVERTISEMENT
“A tethered drill is the only way to accomplish deep drilling with a low mass system, but this requires a system to reel tether in and out” says NASA ARC Principal Investigator, Dr. Carol Stoker.
“We are extremely pleased with the contributions made by MDA Alliance in advancing the design of the tether management system, the complexity of which is often grossly underestimated, speaking from my own experience.”
“Leveraging our Mars surface systems heritage to enable future subsurface science seemed like a natural thing for us to contribute,” says Mike Kearney, President of MDA Alliance.
“We’ve also been developing drilling and coring technologies for the past five years, and hope to collaborate with Dr. Stoker and the NASA Ames Research Center in these areas as well.”
The tether management system will deploy, operate, and retract the drill and its instruments up to a depth of 10 m. It is capable of managing a tether that has both power and data cables and a gas line, and it can carry a tensile load of up to 500 N.
The ICE-AX system includes a drill to generate a borehole and a set of instruments to inspect it including a miniature Biospectral Logger (mBSL) and a Borehole Neutron Probe (BNeuP). The gas line provides gas to the drill for operating the pneumatic anchors designed to
Photograph of MDA Alliance’s Tether Management System prototype for Mars instrumented borehole drill system provide the required weight-on-bit and for removing the cuttings from the borehole during drilling.
Both the drill and the tether management system will be tested in ARC’s Planetary Aeolian Laboratory (PAL) under a Mars-like pressure environment. Successful tests will advance the various elements of the system to a TRL range of 4 through 6.
MDA Alliance, formerly Alliance Space systems LLC, provides customers with world-class aerospace engineering expertise in a small, customer-focused business environment.
The company is a leading provider of mechanical systems engineering, custom design and fabrication in composites structures, robotics and mechanisms, and mechanical analyses for systems operating in extreme environments.
MDA Alliance’s innovative products are in use on interplanetary spacecraft, telecommunications and scientific satellites and in many challenging terrestrial applications.
For more information visit www.alliancespacesystems.com