Considerations on a suction drill for lunar surface drilling and sampling: I. Feasibility study

In this paper, we consider a drilling method, which might prove useful both for applications on the Moon and for drilling on Mars, Venus, or other planetary surfaces. It is based on the use of a cold gas flow for pumping fine-grained debris particles out of the borehole, after they have been pulverized by the bore crown. We present a basic design and demonstrate by a hydrodynamic calculation that such a system should work effectively even on an airless body like the Moon, where the driver gas has to be provided from the associated lander or rover, which acts as the bore platform.