HYDRATION

I am, together with other MIT students, developing, building, and testing a drill-heater rig that is capable of drilling through Mars’ soil, extracting the underlaying water ice for human use, and identifying the composition of the soil that was drilled. This third-generation design features an updated structural rig to mitigate drilling vibrations, a drilling assembly with closed-loop feedback control of the drill bit to penetrate the overburden and access the ice, a water production assembly to melt subsurface ice deposits in situ, recover filtered water and autonomously regenerate the filter, and a mission control subsystem to remotely supervise and execute semi-autonomous operations, return data and derive a digital core. Eight sensors integrated primarily with the drilling assembly return time-stamped data to the operator station where a pre-trained neural network will attempt to deduce a digital profile of the overburden layers. Our work will help NASA select the most efficient water production techniques for human consumption on Mars. In the RASC-AL SE 2021 competition, we won first place and collected more water than all the teams in the previous 3 years of competition combined.