The University of Alaska EPSCoR program, NASA IPY and NSF IPY, Thermal State of Permafrost programs are conducting an outreach effort in conjunction with it's research focus on permafrost and infrastructure. The outreach effort has been termed the "Permafrost Health" program and consists of installing permafrost temperature monitoring systems!


We try to test many different bits for this snow machine trip. We are making artificial frozen gravel (permafrost!) and using hydraulic drill system to drill. This system can measure and control drill torque and down speed. We will estimate efficiency of each bit.