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The search for evidence of ancient climates, extinct life, resources for human exploration, and potential habitats for extant life on Mars, given the desiccated, oxidated, and irradiated conditions near the surface (Navarro-González et al., 2010), requires drilling or some other form of subsurface access. Future Mars surface missions will therefore require some means of acquiring subsurface specimens. The drill becomes both an instrument and a means of acquiring fresh unweathered specimens. Terrestrial teleoperation of a drill on Mars is not feasible given communication lags, and hence drilling and sampling mission operations must be fully automated. A spacecraft intended to drill to depth on Mars must also be capable of hands-off operation for hours at a time without human oversight or control. By the time Earth learns of a drilling problem, the drill will be at least several minutes to hours further along and possibly stuck (Blacic et al., 2000). The Curiosity and Perseverance missions have both sidestepped this issue by limiting drilling to very shallow holes (< 5 cm) with jettisonable bits. Limited to 5cm depth, these cannot reach most subsurface target zones of scientific or exploration interest.
Given lightspeed delays for missions beyond the Moon (tens of minutes) that are much longer than the time required (seconds) to get a drill stuck, deep space drilling and sampling operations must be automated and resilient. Fully hands-off drilling is beyond the capabilities of current Earth industry or existing spacecraft instruments, but application of AI/automation techniques offers a modest standalone autonomous capability. Current and planned Mars drilling missions have had to “drill blind” with little knowledge of the below subsurface, but by using a drill’s vibration with a deployed seismic node (e.g., a Fleetspace “Geode”), the Drill Excitation for Seismic-tomography Imaging (DESI) approach can potentially enable local subsurface mapping to direct drilling in avoiding buried obstacles and optimizing the science return.
The Mars Exploration through Analog-site Drilling (MEAD) project will demonstrate the feasibility of drilling missions to Mars and show the scientific value of such a mission for Mars subsurface exploration. It will demonstrate biomarker detection technology in a 2019 Discovery Icebreaker instrument, the Signs of Life Detector (SOLID), in a realistic field simulation. ARIA, the Astronaut Raman instrument for ISRU and Astrobiology, will test a fieldable capability for determining mineral compositions and trace organics and volatiles, including organic thermal maturity (changes that have occurred in organic matter in rock layers due to heat).
At its field test site, MEAD both profiles biosignatures and extant life with depth across permafrost and ice and investigates organics’ thermal maturity with depth in an icy impact crater. It applies new subsurface targeting protocols and soft-safing fault handling decisions to navigate drill hazards in permafrost, and benefits greatly from field tests in the icy subsurface-Mars impact crater analog of Haughton Crater in the Canadian Arctic. The technological scope of this proposal is the field testing and maturation in 3 successive years of an agentic AI-based change detection and decision protocol for drilling in permafrost and ice, along with (Year 3) automated clean sample transfer motivated by Mars life detection planetary protection requirements. To aid in subsurface science and resource targeting, MEAD will demonstrate a method for using the local seismic signal from drilling vibrations to image the nearby subsurface.
We have demonstrated science operations with the standalone TRIDENT drill and sample-acquisition hardware in hot-dry analog conditions (2019 in Chile in the ARADS PSTAR and 2017 at Rio Tinto in Spain)) now we propose to work with subsurface seismic imaging, subsurface sampling-system automation and life detection instruments at a cold/icy polar desert Mars analog.
MEAD will bring together maturing sensing and sampling technologies, instruments, and elements of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for an automated demonstration of integrated “dirt to data”. Relevant to Mars operations, MEAD enables autonomous science operations, with sampling, transfer, identification of biosignatures and habitability measurements at the Haughton Crater Mars-analog site.
Future planned Mars missions will require the ability to obtain samples in surface and subsurface rocks. MEAD will advance new surface and subsurface science capabilities for landed missions to Mars, relevant to questions called out as Planetary Science goals in the recent Decadal Survey (National Research Council, 2021) including Q11.3 “Life Detection: Is or Was There Life Elsewhere in the Solar System?”as well as Q11.4 “Life Characterization: What Is the Nature of Life Elsewhere, If It Exists?” and regarding dynamic habitability and constraints on life, Q10.7 “What Controls the Continuity or Sustainability of Habitability?”. In the 2022 NASA Strategic Plan MEAD directly addresses Strategic Objective 1.2 (Understand the Sun, solar system, and universe) as we “will develop tools for detecting life, develop tools for determining the relative habitability of present or ancient environments, and explore analog environments on Earth.”
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