Space engineering helps drill better holes in planet Earth
Expertise derived from working on the joint NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and its moon Titan is now being applied to underground drilling machines. This is providing tunnelling engineers with an improved ability to virtually ‘see’ some 40 metres into solid rock and pinpoint obstacles ahead. It’s an old miners’ expression: “There is darkness in front of the pick”. Billions of years of geological history has laid down complex folds of strata, patterns of faulting and embedded irregular objects in the ground beneath our feet. The character of the earth can and often does change unexpectedly with every metre excavated.