Honeybee Robotics
The previously validated design, pictured here drilling into ice during a functional checkout test
Internship & Co-op
The summer before my senior year, I worked at Honeybee Robotics, a spacecraft mechanism company that focuses on developing sampling systems for NASA-funded space missions. My project for the summer was to work with a full-time engineer on RESOURCE, an in-situ sampling system for lunar regolith. This drill is able to do in-situ sampling by integrating all of the instruments into the drill bit and takes measurements of various soil properties as the drill penetrates further into the soil. Many of the instruments, such as NIR, TSH, and DSP, either will be or have been used on previous missions to Mars or the Moon to detect water. To do this, we used a previously validated older percussive drill design that was originally intended for a core breakoff sampling system. My responsibilities for the summer included redesigning the drill to house all the necessary instruments, sourcing components for instruments, and building a prototype of the final design. I continued to work at Honeybee during Fall 2021 to raise the TRL level of the system, and was able to see this design completed and tested. This has been the most complicated and expensive system that I have worked with so far, and has taught me how much work goes into fully validating a design.
A 3D printed prototype of our drill auger design
A close-up picture of the GSE and Z-stage setup for functional drilling
A photo of a ice core from functional checkout testing of the previous design
The mounted fiber optic system, using a red LED to check continuity throughout the drill body.
The final assembly of the drill auger, along with electrical connections of instruments mounted inside the auger
A lunar regolith simulant box I designed and assembled for testing
These photos are from one of the test drills into lunar regolith simulant (JSC-1a). All instruments successfully held up to the stress of drilling, and we were able to record over 5 kg of weight on bit while drilling. This test validated the design and elevated it to TRL 4. This was extremely exciting to see, as at the beginning of June 2021 this was at TRL 1. This design will be tested at NASA Ames with a neutron source and will be run with various instruments, allowing for the first in-situ analysis of lunar regolith.