Humanity’s message to the cosmos has grown from the innocent "Hello from the children of planet Earth" borne by the Voyager spacecraft to "Open wide, this won’t hurt a bit!" No, the "Star Child" from 2001: A Space Odyssey hasn’t grown up to be a dentist – NASA is preparing to cross the threshold of outer space into alternate inner space by drilling deep into celestial bodies like Mars, moons, comets, and asteroids.

The drill bits aren’t available on any Black & Decker: lasers, ultrasonic vibrations, and even a probe that may inchworm autonomously beneath the surface of other worlds.

"There are no conventional drills in our arsenal," said Stephen Gorevan, chairman of Honeybee Robotics, a small but prominent player for 12 years in the tiny league of extraterrestrial robotic drillers.

Taking deep core samples is good geology and planetary science; nothing gives a researcher a better sense of a planet’s history and evolution. But make no mistake, evidence of life is gold for these robotic wildcatters. A fossil will do.

Honeybee operates out of a space above a bakery in New York’s Little Italy. This week its crew is heading 90 miles north to the Callahan-Nannini quarry near Bear Mountain State Park to test new drill ideas on limestone imported from Indiana. Six tons of limestone, selected for its uniform strength, will be stacked into a narrow shaft that plunges 10 meters into the ground. The goal is to prove the firm’s concept, that a probe can drill that deep into the ground on lower power without fluids to lubricate or cool the bit, or to remove debris. "At depths down to 10 to 20 meters, we pull the debris out with dry drilling and chip flute transport to the surface. It works. For very deep drilling we transport the chips to the surface periodically," Gorevan explains. The drill also has a hollow tip for taking tidy core samples.

The drill is also unusual because it is made of several cylindrical extensions, or "strings," that link together for greater depths, rather then forcing NASA to launch one long device that might prove unsteady anyway. If demonstrations at the quarry this week prove the wisdom of those approaches, Honeybee will be a step closer to building the robot that will sample rocks from 20 meters below the Martian surface in 2007.

Other systems will also be put to the test against the deep limestone, and some haven’t even reached that stage, explains Marketing Director Mame McCutchin. "The locking mechanism of the drill strings is another technology being tested but, at this stage, the strings will be attached manually, as we have not yet developed the automated connecting device for these strings of this size. We are not, at this stage, attempting to simulate a Martian environment. We are proving certain isolated components," she said.

But the Deep Drilling Sample Acquisition Transfer System appears, at least superficially, quite conventional compared with Honeybee’s radical Inchworm Deep Drilling System. The jointed robot, developed for steam pipe welding under Manhattan, looks like the mechanical analog to the life astrobiologists dream of finding. The goal is to make a robot that can go one kilometer into the stony crust of Mars or ice shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa without a power cable or computer link, or any other such umbilical cord, to the lander that deployed it. Its creators at Honeybee boast it may go tens of kilometers down, solo.

Six feet divided evenly between the front and rear segments of the Inchworm grip the walls of a tunnel in succession, and a coil of flights along its body pass rubble to the rear. It can take samples and perform analyses at preset depths along the way. The full cycle of digging and moving forward breaks down into five steps:

But, regarding Europa at least, why all of the bumping and grinding when you could just melt through the ice? "One thing we do not favor is the use of heat for getting through ice. As Malcolm Mellor of the Cold Regions Research Laboratory used to point out: The energy
needed to melt a unit mass of ice is sufficient to lift it against earth's gravity to a height of 34 km," Gorevan notes. Besides, melting brings up the problem of refreezing around the probe’s instruments. Gorevan argues that it’s best to let sleeping phases of H2O lie by drilling with a slow rotation and a bit that pulls heat away from its workspace. And by leaving things cold you can get more uses out of one drill because like limestone, "Actually ice is a rock," Gorevan observes.

To arrive at Honeybee’s unusual solutions, the company’s engineer’s had to learn all about the drills already used by other industries like petroleum exploration, mining, and surgery…and to forget them. "We searched all these industries in the beginning. But there was no help to be found. This is because almost all terrestrial drilling could relay on virtually limitless power, thrust and torque. This is not case with planetary exploration drilling. New systems,right down to new cutting teeth designs, had to be developed," Gorevan says.

Other experts in the field were luckier.

But maybe Gorevan didn’t look hard enough. Other experts in the field were luckier. A Star Wars weapons program has yielded a stationary drill bit of multiple lasers that blasts and smoothes a core shaft. The natural gas industry is running with that project, but NASA is checking into it too. And drills that pock surfaces using bits that vibrate to ultrasonic frequencies were first developed for surgery on bones, the ultimate inner space, but have become the darlings of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.