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The DAME test site inside Haughton Crater, on Devon Island.
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The DAME test site inside Haughton Crater, on Devon Island.
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The DAME test site inside Haughton Crater, on Devon Island.
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The DAME test site sits inside Haughton Crater, on Devon Island, on a thick layer of grey fallback breccia. This impact-generated material has a structure and texture similar to the regolith found on the surface of the Moon and Mars. Here, the dome tent houses the drill, with a generator on the left and communications antenna on the right.
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The DAME drill is made for NASA by Honeybee Robotics in Manhattan, who also built the Rock Abrasion Tool on the current Mars Exploration Rovers. The summer field tests on Devon Island are to validate and demonstrate automated, hands-off software control of this planetary-prototype drill. The two lasers on the stand in the foreground are laser vibrometers, which (without touching the rotating shaft) measure the movements and vibration patterns of the drill in motion.
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The computer controlling the DAME drill may select either a cutting bit for softer frozen material, or change to a coring bit when harder rocks or ice is encountered. Here, the coring bit is shown to be mostly full of ice after a bit swap. The combination of permafrost and impact rocks make the Haughton site arguably the best analog site in the world for testing drills intended for icy regolith on Mars or the lunar poles. Automation is required for drilling on Mars because of lightspeed delays.
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Cores from drilling at the DAME site show embedded ice laters in the regolith-like breccia. The 2007 Mars Phoenix mission hopes to find ice layers in the regolith in high Martian latitudes, using a scoop to scrape down to ice below the surface.
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The Haughton-Mars Project research station in the High Arctic is used cooperatively by NASA and Canadian Space Agency projects. The HMP base shown here provides logistics and support at the Haughton Crater field test and analog science site, including the DAME drilling automation tests this year. Dr. Pascal Lee is the principal investigator with the Mars Institute, who operates the HMP base for CSA and NASA.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
Click on the image for full-resolution.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
Click on the image for full-resolution.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
Click on the image for full-resolution.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
Click on the image for full-resolution.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
Click on the image for full-resolution.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
Click on the image for full-resolution.
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Mars drill prototype device at NASA Ames Research Center.
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Brian Glass, is a scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, located in California's Silicon Valley and the principal investigator for the Drilling Automation for Mars Exploration (DAME) project. The DAME project team is developing drill automation not only for a Mars drill, but also for other planetary drills.
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