3d geologists - Space Apps Challenge

3d geologists | Virtual Planetary Exploration

Virtual Planetary Exploration

Your challenge is to create interactive 3D models of equipment (e.g., planetary geology tools) that future space explorers can use for activities like exploring a planetary surface.

Project AND (Automatic Non-heating Drill)

Summary

Studying the moon, starting from apollo 13 missions the astronauts started using drills to investigate and collect samples to study the nature of the moon but the drill they used had so many problems as they had to use it at a slow speed in order in order to protect the sample from heat and the astronaut had to do a physical effort to get the drill stem out of the soil so we made some improvements to make both the astronauts and the scientists work easier when they go to mars on 2024 as we designed the drill stem to be evacuated from the middle to pull one column of soil automatically and making a cooling system that will make the drill work with a speed higher than the last one.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our chosen challenge is talking about creating or developing an equipment that can help the astronauts in geologizing and discovering (the moon or in any Planet especially for the 2024 mars mission), and we decided to develop an equipment that is used in drilling. This equipment is very important for most of astronauts because it is used for discovering the Moon's or planet’s interior. Using this tool takes a lot of time and effort. The used to drill had a speed 57.69 SMF (surface feet per minute) while the ordinary drill cuts with 150 to 300 SMF due to decreasing the speed of the axis of the drill as it makes 280 turns per minute so one meter digging takes 55.6 minutes, but with our adjustment or our development it will take less time and effort with high quality of work.

Our development:

We tried to solve two different difficult problems in the old drill.

1-the problem of taking the sample from the surface of the moon and extracting the drill from the surface.

We want to make the drill similar to the old one, but with some additions, it will make with an evacuated spiral tube from the inside, the handle in a specific limit of work will go to the top automatically of the drill, and we will use two strong motors to pull the drill from the ground. When the drill been pulled all the sample will go up with it.

2- Solving of heat problem.

There is a very difficult problem that face the astronauts (who use the drill), when they use the drill after a very short time the drill become very hot and they stop working to make it safe and cold. If we make a net of small tubes inside the drill and it will be full of water and it dependent on the water physical property, the cold water goes down and hot water go up. The cold water in the bottom will make the drill always cold and after time it will become hot, it will go up to the room that has dry ice to make the water cold again, after that it will go down. By this we will have a cycle of water that will keep the drill cold.

All of these things if it made in real it will reduce the effort and the time, and make all the astronauts more confrontable, because in the past they take a lot of time to make a very small work but after this development all work will be accomplished in small time and will allow the astronauts to have more time for observing the planet and this is what we want.

How We Developed This Project

The main purpose of Apollo 11 was to discover the moon and know what its surface consists of, the most of their work was to collect samples and come back to earth. In every sample collection process, they do a lot of work from drilling and extracting the drill and collection of the samples take a lot of time as only when they dig 1 meter with the drill, they need 55 min so it takes from them a lot of time so we worked in improving this process to make this task easier for astronauts.

The Apollo Lunar Surface Drill was flown on Apollo 13, 15, 16, and 17 was collecting a 2-3 m deep core of lunar material. The battery-powered, rotary percussion drill operated speeds (280 rotations per minute, 2270 blows per minute) low enough that cooling of the bit was not required. We thought that in this way, we waste a time that we can invest in more exploration work. For this problem, we tried to help in increase the number of rotation and at the same time maintain the temperature of the drill.

We realize that the way that can help in the maintenance of the temperature is to make a cooling system that can work in reducing the temperature of the drill stem while it works to help us in increasing the number of rotations. The solution that we reached was to have a path in the drill stem and this path will be filled with water and a container that filled with dry ice so the path of the water moves through the dry ice container to make the water cooler so that from the water movement the drill temperature decrease.

After we make this idea there was another issue that consumes time in the drilling process that was samples collecting and there are layers that would be better for us to know their arrangement as on mars there is an oxidized iron dust layer and under it, there is the volcanic basalt rock, therefor knowing the layers arrangement and components might help us in understanding of mars in 2024.

For this purpose, we figure out that it will be better if the drill stem was hollow from the middle so at the time that we pull the drill out of the soil vertically a one column of soil will be extracted by the function of two large gears connected to the drill stem and attached to smaller gears that they are all attached to two motors in order to obtain strength and to make this process much easier we give the handle ability to move upward without the drill stem and to arms fixed to the drill stem which will give the ability to pull the drill vertically without any human efforts.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

All the data that was offered by the space agencies especially NASA was used to choose the perfect tool that we could develop and the information about it was from these resources in addition to the nature of mars ground to make sure that the used metal is the drill stem will be suitable for the drilling process and the rest of the information that is related to the solution as the cooling system and and the calculation of the speed of the drill was through different and famous websites.