NASA eyes Northern technology.

A future mission to Mars searching for the source of extraterrestrial life may one day include mining-based technology developed in Sudbury.

During a swing through Northern Ontario in late May, technicians connected with the Mars exploration probes from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Ames Research Centre and the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, along with the Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, toured Sudbury to sample some of the latest accomplishments the community has made in robotic drilling.

High on their agenda was to check out some of the leading edge technology prototypes at the Northern Centre of Advanced Technology (NORCAT) to evaluate whether it holds any promise for a drilling program on the red planet, which may take place as early as 2007.

"We've very impressed with the quality of the technology that we've seen, as well as the people," David Beaty, a Mars sample handling manager at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab, says.

Though he stressed NASA has not officially approved of any drilling missions to Mars, it certainly remains a "candidate" among their considerations in their advance planning for a wide range of future missions.

"We're looking at the best existing commercial and off-the-shelf technologies wherever we find it," says Brian Glass, a NASA project manager at Ames Research Centre, "and this (at NORCAT) is some of the best to be found anywhere."

NORCAT's executive director and CEO Darryl Lake would like nothing better than to bring the space industry to Northern Ontario.

For the last six years Lake has been cultivating a relationship with the United States space agency ever since making a side trip from his annual Florida excursion to the Daytona 500 to make a contact at the Kennedy Space Centre. That eventually led to a collaboration with SpaceDev, an American company specializing in commercial space exploration, in developing deep-space drilling technology for mineral and resource extraction on asteroids and other near-earth bodies.

Lake has long maintained that there are many technical similarities between remotely operated mine equipment and space exploration operations. There are a multitude of potential spinoffs for Sudbury companies, he says.

"We think we're the best in mining technology in the world," says Lake, who wants NASA to establish a presence within NORCAT's facilities on Barrydowne Road. "I want to be able to say to the business community in Sudbury that because of our expertise in mining, which is world renowned, we can work with the best in the world."

NORCAT is an internationally known non-profit corporation dedicated to the advancement of new technologies in mining, energy, resource and construction sectors through the development of new products and processes. He believes NORCAT"s ace in the hole in luring new "flagship" tenants like Master Builder and MD Robotics into their residency program is its Onaping Falls underground test facility - a retired Falconbridge mine where much of its training and prototype activity takes place.

Their new alignment with NASA and its partners is considered a great leap forward for NORCAT after signing a memorandum of intent to work together as a consortium in brainstorming possible project ideas.

Already some Sudbury outfits such as Electric Vehicle Controllers Ltd., Falter Engineering, Inco and Laurentian University's mining automation lab have gained a foothold in the space business by teaming up with NORCAT and SpaceDev in the development of the asteroid drilling program.

The idea is to take a diamond drill, shrink it down to fit inside a space vehicle or lander fora rendezvous with a planet or asteroid for exploratory drilling. NASA's visit may be a crucial step toward fast-tracking the project into the next phase.

The search for the origins of extraterrestrial life on Mars or its Europa moon is identified as a "critical goal" of the agency's space science program, says Glass. "If one wanted to do that; one would need to go below the surface (and) that would take some kind of planetary drilling technique."

To accomplish this task, NASA is committed to finding the best private-sector expertise available and securing partnerships for project-specific technology transfers.

"Where I work we do not have drilling expertise," Glass says. "NORCAT has a lot of (drilling technology) partners, many of whom we've seen in the last few days. That's obviously the place to look rather than reinvent some in-house if NASA likes what it sees, he says the agency is not adverse to setting up shop in Sudbury as it has been with other foreign collaborative efforts in Russia or Guyana.