The Development of the European UItrasonic Planetary Core Drill (UPCD)

Future exploration missions to rocky bodies within the Solar System may wish to utilize drill systems on landed vehicles which simply cannot deliver the weight on bit, or accommodate the mass and volume levels which are required for the use of existing drill technology. This issue is being tackled by the development of the Ultrasonic Planetary Core Drill (UPCD) project. This paper shall detail the development effort of this drill to date, describing how lessons learned from early technology have informed the current design. Details of the Concept of Operations, the routine by which the drill samples and caches rocks for later analysis will also be presented, with an emphasis on the effect that the refinement of this process has had on the overall design.