Terrasope
One machine. It bores, takes the sample, reads it on board, and decides where the next hole goes.
Critical-mineral sensing for ground that denies GPS, satellite and people. A Craftpine study, Ontario.
Status, August 2026. The record layer has run: offline, deterministic across architectures, 31 checks green. The machine does not exist yet. Nothing here describes hardware that has been built. A build program opened August 27: one deliverable a week, written before the work and scored after. The ledger.
Nothing below is built. The record layer is the only part that has run, and it ran on a bench against a mock instrument. Everything else is specification.
Design environment
- GPS denied. Position comes from the hole, not the sky. Collar survey, inertial carry between setups, and depth from the feed itself.
- Satellite denied. Nothing is streamed. Every result is durable on the machine first and moves only when a link happens to exist.
- Human denied. No operator to interpret a gauge, re-seat a sample, or notice that the log went wrong four runs ago.
Record
The only part that has run
Every event durable at the edge, ordered, deduplicated, reconciled whenever a link returns. 31 checks green across two runtime paths and two architectures. 52 ms median spectrum to durable on a Raspberry Pi 5. Uplink cut mid-run: zero loss, zero gaps, zero duplicates. First spike.
Order of attack
Record first, metal last
Autonomy on heavy machinery fails on data before it fails on mechanics. A rig that drills perfectly and cannot prove what it recovered has produced nothing anyone can file. The record layer was also the cheapest to falsify: a day on a bench instead of a quarter on a prototype.
Where the question came from
A year of watching field work, closely, in Ontario.
Every reading is a claim somebody has to defend later.
The tools existed. The practice had not moved.
The field work is Bracebridge Technical’s. The photographs live there. bracebridgetechnical.com
Mineral exploration is the entry, not the ceiling. Ground that denies GPS, satellite and people is most ground worth working.