Perseverance Rover Corer Railizer Mechanism Development for Drill Feed and Stabilization

The Mars 2020 Rover, nicknamed Perseverance, which landed on Mars on February 18, 2021 featured many new technology developments including the Sample Caching System (SCS). The SCS featured a Coring Drill, Robotic Arm, Adaptive Caching Assembly, and an interface to the Surface Science Instruments. The Coring Drill was both mass and volume constrained and was designed to create rock cores, surface abrasions, and collect regolith samples by using a rotary percussive drill with a core break mechanism, interchangeable bit chuck, two speed transmission, contact sensing stabilizers, and a Weight on Bit sensing feed mechanism. The configuration design of the Coring Drill assembly went through many iterations to best utilize the available space while balancing mechanism functions of each subsystem. The Railizer mechanism is the combination of the Feed Rails, that support the Corer Body and allow axial translation, with the Stabilizer Mechanism that articulates to conform to the rock topography and allows the Robotic Arm to preload against the Martian surface. Combining the Feed guide rails and Stabilizer system saved mass but also allowed for a modular design that enabled quick integration with the Turret Structure and streamlined the I&T project phase. The Corer internals can be crane lifted straight up out of the Turret structure without disturbing the alignment of the Drill relative to the Bit Exchange Dock or Robotic Arm interfaces. This allowed parallel subsystem assembly, testing, and final integration at the Rover assembly level. This paper provides an overview of the design, development, and testing of the Corer Feed and Stabilizer subsystems.