An automatic assisted drill system for sampling deep layer regolith of extraterrestrial celestial bodies

As one of the most important parts of deep space exploration missions, the sampling technologies of extraterrestrial celestial bodies (ECBs) have attracted the attention and interest of many researchers. As a relatively efficient and convenient sampling technique, drill samplers have been applied in different ECBs exploration missions. Different from the previous drill apparatus, this paper introduces a novel automatic assisted drill system (AADS), which is used to sample the deep layer regolith of ECBs. This drilling system can sample the deep regolith layer under manual assistance or unmanned automatic operation mode. The sampler has improved and designed a segmented detachable coring pipe, drilling pipe and casing pipe. It can largely maintain the layer information in the depth direction of the ECBs regolith and can also automatically change the drill sampling process through the driller change system to improve the sampling efficiency. Finally, an automatic test apparatus was designed, and an experimental platform was established to conduct a drill sampling test for the AADS sampler. The experimental results show that the AADS sampling system can successfully obtain at least 2.4 m depth and 1.1 kg weight simulated regolith samples.