Lunar Prospecting Rover Utilizing a Lunar Drill, Pneumatic Excavator, and Gas Jet Trencher

Lunar In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) requires groundtruthing of the water-ice deposits in 3D (lateral and below the surface). This requires the lunar prospecting mission to be mobile (rover, hopper etc.), and have a suite of instruments enabling downhole access and acquisition of icy samples for analysis. In this paper we present a rover-based system that combines three independent instruments for groundtruthing of water-ice deposits. These include Sampling Drill called the MoonBreaker for acquisition of icy soils from ~ 50 cm - 1m depth, Pneumatic Excavator for acquisition of surface regolith, and Jet Trencher for excavating trenches using compressed gas. All three systems are at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 4 or higher and have been tested in the vacuum chamber and analog sites of Antarctic.