Experimental Research on Drilling and Sampling of Lunar Soil Simulant

China is conducting a lunar exploration mission named “Chang’e project”. The goal of the exploration mission is to obtain the drilling core without breaking the original geological information. Since the characteristics of drilling object in lunar exploration mission are different from the soil on the earth, efforts should be greatly made on special sampling methods, sampling drills and the appropriate sampling strategies. Herein, we proposed a novel drilling and coring method, in which a soft-bag is mounted in a rotary-percussive drill for lunar soil sampling. In the process of lunar soil drilling, the driving parameters of several moving units are strongly coupled. The moving units should work cooperatively in order to acquire high coring rate and low power consumption. The relationship between the coring quantity and the drilling parameters will be discussed through experiments. The research showed a clear correlation between rotary drilling torque, sample quantity and rev-feed ratio under specific lunar soil conditions.