Design and Verification of a Novel Sampling System for Lunar Water Ice Exploration

Abstract

Aiming at the problem that it is difficult to collect the subsurface lunar water ice samples quickly due to the cementation-hardening of ice and soil at extremely low temperature in the permanent shadow regions, a novel lunar water ice sampling system is proposed, which uses kinetic energy penetration to efficiently expose the subsurface lunar water ice and uses manipulator to accurately collect and transfer the lunar soil samples. Based on the analysis of the working strategy of the sampling system, an engineering prototype of penetrating modular was designed and developed, and its penetration efficiency was tested based on the principle that the mechanical characteristics are equivalent. The test results show that the penetrating modular can penetrate into the target whose uniaxial compressive strength(UCS) is about 30Mpa (equivalent to the UCS of the simulated lunar water ice) with low power consumption and high efficiency, the penetration depth can reach 234mm, and the penetration time is less than 1s.

Keywords

• Lunar exploration
• water ice
• sampling system
• permanent shadow region