For publishers in Portland, Oregon

The Thrill of the Drill

As I waited for the westbound MAX Thursday, I started watching the action at a construction site across the street. A massive yellow machine, several stories tall on one end, whirred and clacked and drilled into the earth. A drill! A real, live drill.

You see, I’ve spent a good part of this month editing papers about drills. As the Phoenix Mars lander scoops and studies the martian soil, many scientists and engineers here on Earth are devising and testing drills that will go far deeper. Extraterrestrial drilling—digging meters into the crust of the Moon, Mars, Venus, comets, asteroids—is a complicated and engrossing topic in astrobiology. It’s totally awesome!

So I gazed at this drill in downtown Portland. It had a coring bit, more than a meter in diameter and several meters long. The coring bit dug into the soil for some distance; then it was pulled out so that the soil could be dumped and the empty coring bit pushed farther into the soil—to make that hole deeper!

It also looked to be a wireline drill. That is, the pressure and power to dig didn’t come from directly above the drill bit. Instead, a thick metal attachment on the side of the drill applied the force to push into the soil. Meanwhile, power was sent to the drill via a thick black cord (wire) that ran down to the drill bit.

Mind you, I’m not an expert at this. I don’t even know that I’m very good at describing it. The point is I’m amazed at what editing teaches me, with what worlds it connects me. What would I have cared about drills before this month? I would have seen this machine as an ugly, noisy beast. Well, ok, it is still ugly and noisy. But it’s also a drill! And, some day, one of its kin will provide us with samples of soil, rock, and ice from another planet.

Drill stuff:

Learn about the DAME drill at this NASA Ames Research Center website. DAME is an automated drill that, in a modest way, thinks for itself.

Also learn about DAME from the Haughton-Mars Project and Astrobiology Magazine.

See the MARTE drill, another NASA project.

Astronauts on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 used an electric drill on the Moon. (This is a great site if you like the Moon and you like tools!)

The Soviets had an automated drill on their Luna 20 mission to the Moon. Here’s a neat little diagram of Luna 20 (labeled in Russian).

And I suppose I should mention that the July issue of Astrobiology will feature several papers about extraterrestrial drilling.

The DAME drill: There is nothing like a DAME!