Two WSU students are designing a drill to reach water on Mars.
After listening to an episode of the podcast Planetary Radio, Quinn Morley, WSU undergraduate in mechanical engineering at the Olympic College-Bremerton program, learned of the discovery of potential liquid water on Mars and started this project, he wrote in an email.
The drill will need to penetrate through roughly a mile of ice before reaching water on Mars, Morley wrote in an email.
Similar drills are often used in Antarctica to penetrate ice sheets, said Tom Bowen, WSU senior in mechanical engineering at the Olympic College-Bremerton program.
Morley recruited Bowen to be part of the research project after the two were lab partners in an electric circuits course, Morley said in an email.
March 10, 2021
By Tina Hilding, Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture
When Quinn Morley learned three years ago about a discovery of possible liquid water on Mars, he wanted to find it.
“I realized that no one on our planet had any idea how to get to that water in order to sample it,” he said. “That meant I was at the same place on the problem intellectually as the experts were.”
Morley and his colleague, Tom Bowen, both undergraduates in WSU’s mechanical engineering at Olympic College-Bremerton program, have received a $125,000 grant from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to study their idea for an autonomous drill for Mars exploration. They’re one of 16 groups from throughout the U.S. and are the first undergraduate team ever to receive a grant from the program, which supports early-stage research into futuristic space ideas.