In August 2010, Aurora began exploration diamond drilling at the project targeting the Mack and St Joe veins.
Aurora had planned to commence production at the FRGP in 2011 with the Mack and the St Joe scheduled as medium term ore sources.
The FRGP has approximately two years of gold telluride ore in reserve and Aurora is looking to expand the resource base via drilling so as to expand the mine life to five years and to gather information to facilitate capital expenditure decisions relating to increasing capacities at the project.
Murray Watts Drilling Company was contracted to perform resource drilling and to date has completed over 4,400ft of BTW diamond coring targeting the Mack and St Joe veins.
Drilling is scheduled to finish in mid to late November weather permitting, as it is impossible to operate a surface drill program at FRGP during winter with the current drill setup.
Aurora has reported the first tranche of exploration samples returned from ALS that include AGCDD0001 20.9ft @ 4.09 g/t Au & 14.53 g/t Ag from 48.8ft, AGCDD0002 no significant assay, AGCDD0003 8.6ft @ 21.31 g/t Au & 103.61 g/t Ag from 488.1ft, AGCDD0004 10.0 ft @ 2.38 g/t Au & 11.81 g/t Ag from 202.2ft, AGCDD0005 1.7ft @ 9.04 g/t Au & 287.0 g/t Ag from 305 ft, and AGCDD0006 1.7ft @ 2.57 g/t Au & 9.5 g/t Ag from 424.4ft.
In June 2010, Aurora acquired a 50% equity interest in the Black Cloud Mine, a 50 ton/day gravity flotation plant and an operating agreement from Global Minerals.
