Boring 20km into Europa's surface
During an internship at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2016, I designed a system to test a concept for a probe to explore inside of Jupiter’s moon Europa. It uses a circular saw rotating about the vertical axis to create a borehole in ice, which on Europa would be ~20 km deep. I was an author of a paper on this system published in IEEE aerospace, available here.
Figure 1: This component is a level wind for the system. It held a tether (green, 20 km worth) and spooled it out one layer at a time, each layer alternating spiraling inward and outward. The mechanical components rotated about the threaded central pillar and the tether would go up along the red pulley as it traveled along the length of the cyan shaft.
This video shows the probe as it would be applied on Europa.
This video shows a test I designed for verifying that the circular saw concept for creating the borehores works (it does!).
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