Advances in Terrestrial Drilling: Ground, Ice, and Underwater includes the latest drilling and excavation principles and processes for terrestrial environments. The chapters cover the history of drilling and excavation, drill types, drilling techniques and their advantages and associated issues, rock coring including acquisition, damage control, caching and transport, and data interpretation, as well as unconsolidated soil drilling and borehole stability. This book includes a description of the basic science of the drilling process, associated processes of breaking and penetrating various media, the required hardware, and the process of excavation and analysis of the sampled media.

• Describes recent advances in terrestrial drilling.
• Discusses drilling in the broadest range of media including terrestrial surfaces, ice and underwater from shallow penetration to very deep.
• Provides an in-depth description of key drilling techniques and the unified approach to assessing the required tools for given drilling requirements.
• Discusses environmental effects on drilling, current challenges of drilling and excavation, and methods that are used to address these.
• Examines novel drilling and excavation approaches.

Dr. Yoseph Bar-Cohen is the Supervisor of the Electroactive Technologies Group ( and a Senior Research Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech, Pasadena, CA. His research is focused on electro-mechanics including planetary sample handling mechanisms, novel actuators that are driven by such materials as piezoelectric and EAP (also known as artificial muscles), and biomimetics.

Dr. Kris Zacny is a Senior Scientist and Vice President of Exploration Systems at Honeybee Robotics, Altadena, CA. His expertise includes space mining, sample handling, soil and rock mechanics, extraterrestrial drilling, and In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU).