{"id":1039,"date":"2008-08-29T07:15:09","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T11:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2008-08-28T15:34:48","modified_gmt":"2008-08-28T19:34:48","slug":"drilling-in-alien-ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/?p=1039","title":{"rendered":"Drilling in Alien Ice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some of the most interesting places in the solar system are hidden under sheets of ice.  The polar caps of Mars, Saturn&#8217;s moon Enceladus and Jupiter&#8217;s moon Europa will require drilling of some kind to explore thoroughly.<\/p>\n<p>The technology used for drilling in places like Greenland is heavy and complex, which rules it out for loading onto a probe and deploying remotely.  Fortunately, a new drilling method is promising to be much less cumbersome.<\/p>\n<p>The Cryobot probe was recently tested in Antarctica.  It&#8217;s a &#8220;thermal drill,&#8221; which combines blades and heaters in the tip.  This gives it much more flexibility in dealing with the unknown composition of alien ice sheets.<\/p>\n<p>The Space.com site <A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.space.com\/scienceastronomy\/080828-am-thermal-drill-ice.html\">has more<\/A>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of the most interesting places in the solar system are hidden under sheets of ice. The polar caps of Mars, Saturn&#8217;s moon Enceladus and Jupiter&#8217;s moon Europa will require drilling of some kind to explore thoroughly. The technology used for drilling in places like Greenland is heavy and complex, which rules it out for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1041,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions\/1041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/other-worlds-cafe.com\/news\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}