Deltion Innovations, a Sudbury space technology company, announced Jan. 28 that it has been awarded a contract by the Canadian Space Agency.
The company is working on a coring sample drill system, called DESTIN, developed by Deltion.
It was used during a NASA’s experiment on the slopes of Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 2012.
The technology is part of the RESOLVE project (Regolith and Environmental Sciences Oxygen and Lunar Volatiles Extraction), intended to verify the presence of water and other volatiles in the shadowed regions of the moon.
The mission objective is to prospect for water ice near the south pole of the moon, extracting and then analyzing the samples. RESOLVE will launch as part of NASA’s Resource Prospector Mission in 2018.
Deltion’s job is to get the DESTIN drill mission-ready so that it’s suitable to operate at temperatures of -180 C and in a vacuum.
“This is a major milestone for Deltion,” said Deltion CEO Dale Boucher in a Jan. 28 news release/ “This contract will advance our space mining technology one step closer to flight.”
Testing of the drill is planned for later this year at a NASA research centre in Cleveland.
Cleveland.
