Ice pick

A powerful drill designed to bore through the polar ice caps of Mars has undergone testing by NASA in the icy wastes of northern Canada.

The drill is unique in that it is capable of boring more than six feet (1.8m) into the Arctic tundra using no more than a light bulb's worth of power.

A NASA team has spent the past two weeks testing the drill at the Eureka Weather Station on Ellesmere Island in northern

— 690 miles from the North Pole, where conditions are said to be very similar to those found on the moon and Mars.

The two-metre drill was jointly developed by engineers from NASA's Johnson Space Centre and

, a

oilfield services company. When fully developed it should be able to drill several hundreds of metres beneath the surface using no more than 60W of power, produced by an atomic battery or solar arrays.