Development and Testing of PERSEUS: A DIABLO-Based Pneumatic Drill for Borehole Seismometer Deployment

Nearly all seismometers deployed on Earth are buried below the ground to achieve stable instrument temperature and greater seismic coupling. A robotically deployed science instrument PERSEUS, Pneumatic Equipment for Regolith Seismic Exploration and Underground Surveying, has been developed to address this need for lunar seismology. It is designed to bury a sonde with a seismic sensor payload into the surface of the Moon. Instrument burial reduces the scattering attenuation of seismic waves caused by the uppermost layer of and minimizes large instrument thermal fluctuations through a lunar day and night. The pneumatic burial system deploys the sonde with a threshold burial depth requirement of 0.6 meter and can drill up to 1.1 meters (with 0.9 clearance from tip-to-surface) into the lunar regolith. PERSEUS was tested in a vacuum chamber with lunar regolith analog BP-1 to successfully demonstrate the end-to-end operations.