It can’t be made out of the usual light alloys used in spacecraft as it needs to be made of relatively thick steel. The problem is, a penetrator is the opposite of how space engineers think. Something like these would be perfect for dropping on Mars or the moons of Jupiter, but no launch vehicle or probe known could carry a 2-ton penetrator such a distance, so a compromise needs to be made between strength and weight. The Americans had a similar problem during the 1991 Gulf War and in less than a month came up with penetrator bombs made out of surplus 8-inch (203 mm) artillery gun barrels that could plow through reinforced concrete. The trick is having them dig in instead of smashing to bits on impact.īuilding a penetrator for the job is actually very simple and the technology has been around since Barnes Wallis worked on the problem during World War II as a way of taking out German bunkers. It would be much simpler to just drop instrument packages from orbit over a wide area and let them burrow under the sand or ice using their own momentum. It works, but such drilling is complicated, slow and limited in how deep it can go or how great an area it can cover. Now, they can rove about and the NASA Curiosity rover has conducted the first robotic drilling operation on another planet. Landers have come a long way since the days when all they could do is passively take pictures and temperature readings. The goal is to find ways of delivering instruments beneath the ground or ice of alien worlds without drilling. As part of its Core Technology Programme for Cosmic Vision, the agency fired a pair of experimental surface penetrators from a rocket sled at a test facility at the UK Military of Defence Pendine site in Wales last July. Normally, a spacecraft slamming into a planet’s surface at the speed of sound is considered a bad thing, but the European Space Agency (ESA) plans to do just that.
The penetrator hitting the ice target as part of efforts to develop a way to deliver instruments beneath a planet's surface (Image: Astrium)
0 kommentar(er)
