The PSU Student Space Programs Laboratory BtI Team developed the project far into the brainstorming phase. One of the requirements of the submission was to include a 3-D animation of the technology in motion. The team management could not find an animator to create this, so they canceled further developments of the project.

Despite the unfortunate end of the project, I put a lot of hard work into my tasks and the design of the technology. When I joined the team, I was assigned the task of researching the use of different wavelengths of light to melt ice into steam. I discovered that microwaves could heat water effectively at a distance of 0 to 20 cm away from the waves’ origin. Radio waves are effective for water between 20 and 350 cm away. The proposed design of the payload at the time was a rover that would use a tent to capture steam into a cold trap. Considering that the rover was not intended to break the surface, I proposed we used only radio waves as a heat source.

To do this, I investigated commercial Radio Frequency (RF) heating devices, which are used in large-scale bakeries. RF Heating sources are available in power levels up to 500 kW continuous power output at ISM frequencies in the range of 3 to 30 MHz. References showed that RF heating can be effective to extract water vapor from permafrost using a heating source comprising a 30 kW device operating at a frequency of 27 MHz.

However, several issues came up with this idea. First and foremost, RF heating requires the material to be heated to be placed between two plates. Radio frequencies are bounced in-between to stimulate the water molecules within the material. To use RF heating in a lunar environment, I had to figure out how to put the regolith between two plates. The second problem stood as a question as to how the steam will reach the surface if there is no breach of the ground.

The team took a lot of inspiration, in many parts, from a patent by Trans Astra. They designed a rover that also used RF heating and a cold trap mechanism to gather water on the lunar surface. The patent involved three ground-penetrating probes that are connected in parallel. They used a commercial RF heater for their experiments. The three penetrating probes at one end of the regolith container are connected in push-pull with the three probes at the other end. This will provide strong RF fields from end to end through the simulated regolith. This solved the two-plate issue. Implementing rods into the design would allow the radio waves to flow through the regolith. However, this did not solve the ground breach issue.

While steam could rise through certain materials in certain conditions, I assumed that there could be no guarantee that the regolith on the surface would be that porous. In addition, the region to which NASA would send the payloads is a Permanently Shadowed Region (PSR). This absence of sunlight makes for a very, very cold temperature. According to NASA’s Break the Ice Mission Scenario, the surface temperature ranged from 50K to 200K, with an average summer temperature of 130K and an average winter temperature of 80K. To express how cold these temperatures are, the highest temperature (200K) equals -99.67 degrees F and -73.15 degrees C. This type of temperature guarantees that the surface regolith will be extremely hard and solid. From here, I concluded that my research has led me to a dead-end for the direction the project was going: the steam needed an escape.

It was then that I began to play around with the idea of a drill. I looked at traditional, Earth-based drilling systems to get inspiration. One of the first ideas I had was to replace the six probes with long, thin drills that contained the radio wave generation hardware inside. However, again running into the breach problem, I decided to work on a design for one single drill.

The drill I had in mind was a large auger. I considered perhaps winding the RF probes into the twin helix blades on the auger. However, with concerns about the durability and safety of the probs in such a position, as well as the balance of electric fields within the auger, I decided against it. In the unbeknownst final weeks of the project, I began to develop the design shown below.

My idea is as follows:

• – A robotic arm holds the entirety of the drill such that the volume of the rover could be reduced
  • – The arm would also allow for more flexible usage of the auger
• – The arm holds a box that holds the auger to the arm
  • – The box would include rollers/motors to move the auger up and down and to spin it
• – Attached to the box is a spring and a huge, cone-shaped funnel, which would be made of a solid, inflexible material
  • – As the auger moves down into the regolith, the box and spring would push down onto the funnel
  • – This creates a potential water-tight fitting
• – Attached to the funnel would be four to six probes
  • – The probes, in theory, would be housed inside long, thin drills