Description
Chairs:
Professor Eric Steig and Mr. Alex Pyne
The control system for ice coring drills present many design challenges due to the harsh environments in which the components must operate. This is further complicated by the need to send power and communicate over long winch cables with small conductors. An increasing amount of components can be purchased off-the-shelf, however custom electronics are still often required to provide...
Recent evidence reveals that a large number of subglacial lakes exist beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Exploring the subglacial lake is of great interest to the science community. RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) will provide an exploration tool to measure and sample the subglacial lake environments while the subglacial lake remains isolated from the glacier surface and atmosphere. The...
Bench tests of core drilling in ice with various filling liquids were performed during the seasonal shift period of the 64th Russian Antarctic Expedition (December 2018 - January 2019) with the use of Borehole 5G drilling facilities. Experimental studies were done using the test bench developed at the St.Petersburg Mining University, that was first applied in 1994 prior to drilling Borehole G5...
Monitoring the tension in cables is significant in some ice drill and deep water applications. Take our RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) for example. It is able to melt a hole to ice sheet bottom and is able to move upwards. A winch is installed inside RECAS to release and recover the cable, whose tension needs to be monitored in real time in order to control the behavior of the winch. As...
Introduction: Europa is a primary target in the search for past or present life because it is potentially geologically active and likely possesses a deep global ocean in contact with a rocky core underneath its outer ice shell. Theory and observation indicate that the icy surface shell is approximately 3-30 km thick, depending on models [1, 2].
Reaching Europa Ocean: To reach the subsurface...
Comparing with conventional ice core drilling method, laser ice drilling falls in the category of a new clean drilling technology involving innovative kind of non-mechanical physical ice destruction . High energy laser beam is applied to the surface of ice directly, and the ice is heated and melted rapidly. Laser drilling technology has been developed promptly by virtue of high penetration...
We present the results of laboratory and field tests of several new technologies developed at Stone Aerospace during the past five years in response to NASA needs to advance technology readiness levels for planetary missions to icy Ocean Worlds. Each of the approaches we present were developed in response to a common problem: emulating a nuclear power source that will be used on a flight...
Recent evidence reveals that a large number of subglacial lakes exist beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Exploring the subglacial lake is of great interest to the science community. RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) will provide an exploration tool to measure and sample the subglacial lake environments while the subglacial lake remains isolated from the glacier surface and atmosphere. This...
