NASA’s Phoenix lander revealed water ice mere inches beneath the martian surface, and chemical evidence from the landing site strongly hints that the region is habitable. But learning whether there is life in martian ice will require drilling — and drilling on Mars will be anything but easy.

As part of the IceBite Project, funded by NASA’s ASTEP program, a company in Brooklyn, NY, is designing and testing a series of drills to determine the optimum configuration for boring into subsurface martian ice.