Hi!

There is increasing talk of the need to
send either manned spacecraft or unmanned spacecraft to Mars equipped with "deep-drilling equipment". [i.e., depths of thousands of feet],
and further down the years, onto Europa, perhaps, to do the same; all for the search for fossils or living critters.

FIRSTLY: To drill thousands of feet
down, here on Earth, whether it's an oilfield in Texas, waterwells in Arizona or gasfields in Alberta, you need "hundreds of tons"
of hardware [i.e., drilling derricks,
diesel engines, thousands of feet of
piping, etc.].

SECONDLY: Manned drilling-rigs
encounter problems [such as broken drillpipes, stuck drill-bits, etc] that delay things on earth. On Mars, even with a manned mission, those types of problems would be disastrous
as far as the science agenda on Mars goes.

-----------------------------------
But what if NASA were able to develop
a complete interplanetary "drilling-rigs" that weighed no more that FIVE TONS in earth's gravity?...
And what if that self-contained interplanetary drilling-rig was compact enough to fit inside a <b.U-HAUL trailer, yet have the means to drill down <b.thousands of feet?...And what if the equipment were made cybernetically autonomous [even equipped with self-diagnosing, self-correcting, even self-repairing hardware and software]?

Well then...Such a self-contained, fully-autonomous, five-ton interplanetary drilling-rig would
have obvious geological/exobiological
applications for either Mars or Europa...

But this is for you, Dr. Alex Blackwell!...I know that in your field of endeavour such a futuristic, high-tech interplanetary drilling apparatus would be most welcome; you would have no problem justifying its expense or function because of its potential to make great scientific
discoveries.

But, Dr. Blackwell, you know as well as I do that such futuristic equipment
as I've outlined the parameters for
"would cost billions of dollars"...
How would you justify that to the taxpayer?...
Here are my suggestions: Taxpayers
should be made to realize that such an
high-tech interplanetary "drilling-rig"
would have clear "down-to-earth" aplications, such as drilling for
oil, gas or subterranean watersupplies, etc...
Imagine! You can take a modified version of this compact, autonomous drilling-rig and drop it off
in the snake-infested, steamy, swampy, vegetation-choked tropical rainforest
of Panama where it will be programmed
to drill for oil or gas without the need of an army of roughnecks to operate it.

cheers.

Jacob

On Mars, such problem