Control system for a drilling & coring device in lunar exploration

China is endeavoring to implement the lunar exploration mission, namely Chang'e. In Phase III of the project, the aim is focusing on acquiring lunar soil sample and bringing them back to the earth. Due to the high efficiency of drilling in granular substance, a drilling and coring device is selected as the sampling tool to acquire the soil sample along the vertical direction. A novel flexible-tube coring method is adopted in the design of drilling and coring device. A flexible tube is mounted inside the hollow auger to wrap the central soil into closed space. Two steps are included in the whole sample-acquiring process: drilling and coring. In order to verify the proposed sampling method, we have developed a drilling and coring prototype to realize all the necessary operations. Herein, by use of the architecture of xPC Target, a control system based on 1553B communication is presented for the process control. Both the hardware design and software interface are discussed in this paper. Finally, experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the control system.