The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploration of New Terrains (TRIDENT); a One-Meter  Drill for the Lunar Resource Prospector Mission  Gale Paulsen*, Zachary Mank*, Alexander Wang*, Paul Chow*, Cody Hyman*, Thomas Thomas*,   Allen Lee*, Kris Zacny*, James Smith**, Jacqueline Quinn**, Erik Mumm*** and Ron Hayes*** Abstract  A desire to prospect for resources on the Moon, namely water, has led to the development of The Regolith  and Ice Drill for Exploration of New Terrains (TRIDENT) drilling system. TRIDENT is a 16-kg rotary  percussive drill and deployment system that was designed to be deployed from a roving platform and drill  to a depth of 1 meter. Designs and testing supported by the Resource Prospector (RP) mission have  enabled the TRIDENT system to reach a NASA TRL of 6. Through the development of this system, many  lessons were learned. These include lessons learned for cable/pulley and capstan mechanisms, custom  slip-ring designs, instrumentation of temperature sensors for measuring subsurface temperatures, sample  transfer mechanisms, brazing tungsten carbide to titanium, and the replacement of the drill’s cable harness  with flexible printed circuits. This summary highlights some of the major lessons learned along with  recommended designs and tests to improve the design of the TRIDENT.  Introduction  In 2014, Honeybee Robotics was selected to help the NASA Resource Prospector (RP) mission [1] meet  its goals of advancing the technology readiness level (TRL) of the Resource Prospector system by  increasing the TRL of the drilling subsystem. The primary goal of the RP mission is to explore the Lunar  South Pole Aitken Basin in search of water ice and other volatiles. Instruments on board the RP rover are  designed to help locate and quantify the concentration of volatiles (with emphasis on water). This mission  is to provide ground truth data in support of previous water detection missions (i.e. LCROSS [2] and other  surveying spacecraft). The Lunar environment that the RP mission will experience include hard vacuum,  cryogenic temperatures (down to 40K), radiation, and low gravity (1/6th g).    Hurley et. al. [3] state that the desiccated layer on the Moon is on the order of 10’s of cm. This would  suggest that to find ice on the Moon would require penetrating the surface beyond a few centimeters. The  mission requirement, derived from the current remote sensing data, is to have the ability to drill to a depth  of 1 meter below the Lunar surface. However, penetrating the surface is only one of the functions of the  drilling system. Other functions include sample delivery to a surface directed Near Infrared Volatile  Spectrometer Subsystem (NIRVSS), delivering sample to an onboard Oxygen & Volatile Extraction Node  (OVEN) and Lunar Advanced Volatile Analysis (LAVA) subsystem, and to measure the subsurface  temperature and strength of the regolith.  This paper describes the development of The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploration of New Terrain  (TRIDENT) subsystem for the Resource Prospector mission (Figure 1). Over the course of this development  there have been a few important lessons learned on the drill mechanism design and on using this particular  mechanism for sensing. These lessons include:  *Honeybee Robotics Spacecraft Mechanisms Corp., a division of Ensign Bickford Industries, Pasadena, CA ** NASA Kennedy Space Center, FL *** Honeybee Robotics Spacecraft Mechanisms Corp., a division of Ensign Bickford Industries, Longmont, CO Proceedings of the 44th Aerospace Mechanisms Symposium, NASA Glenn Research Center, May 16-18, 2018 NASA/CP—2018-219887 13