Developing a Drill System for Lunar Regolith Extraction

초록

Water extraction technology through In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is essential for future lunar exploration, human lunar settlement, and the leap to more distant planets. In this study, we developed a drilling system with dimension of 100x30x30cm that can be mounted on a rover and evaluated its performance. A mixture of lunar regolith and water used to create a maximum hardness condition similar to lunar soil, and the mining performance of the drill system was evaluated under different temperature conditions. The drilling speed, energy consumption, and volume of mined lunar soil were measured under each condition, an it was found tha the drilling resistance increased with lower temperatures and higher hardness, which tends to decrease mining efficiency. The drilling system developed in this study provides fundamental data for lunar regolith mining an is expected to lead to the development of more efficient lunar resource mining systems for future exploration missions.