Product Features

Background

Remote sensing evidence suggests that water ice may be present in large amounts in permanently shadowed areas of the lunar poles. These cold traps, typically portions of craters, never receive sunlight and are thought to be as cold as 40 degrees Kelvin.

The Project

NASA Exploration Systems Mission Directorate funded a research and development grant in which Honeybee provides a drilling and sampling system as the central hardware for a large suite of sensing instruments. The eventual goal would be to search for this water ice and fully characterize the surface and subsurface to approximately 2 meters depth. Honeybee is working in a large team led by the US Army Corps of Engineers, Cold Regions Research & Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), initially in the Phase I R&D effort.

Honeybee’s role includes, but is not limited to, the technology to enable drilling into potentially icy, densely packed lunar regolith with limited spacecraft weight; accommodating five downhole sensing modules to characterize the subsurface in situ; the sensitive operation of acquiring samples while retaining volatile material; returning samples to the surface and delivering them for detailed compositional analysis.

In addition to the technology developments, the project faces the significant complexities of systems engineering and co-engineering involved in the integration of an ambitious, mission-scale payload suite. Some of the guiding principles for the project are modularity, system coherence, data fusion and analysis, and direct and indirect applicability to upcoming missions to the moon and to Mars.

The Benefits

The projected amounts of water could indicate a significant resource for spacecraft propellant, construction processes and human consumption, both for a permanent lunar presence and as a way station for missions to other destinations, but the presence of this water needs to be verified directly. The CRUX payload could be described as a means of thorough reconnaissance for subsequent In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) and construction efforts on the moon and later on Mars. Developed technology for drilling, sampling and sensing in cold, icy and low gravity environments can be applied to other planetary and extreme environment exploration, such as, for example, on Europa, Titan, and comets.