Through the financial assistance of PIRSA's PACE Initiative, Iluka Resources has undertaken exploratory drilling activities on its Maralinga area ELs 4330, 4333, 4334, 4337 and 4338 in the eastern Eucla Basin, as approved Year 6 programme DPY6-61. The aim of the latest PACE funding proposal was to test a portion of the Barton Range fossil shoreline within the Maralinga Embayment that has not had any previous exploration for heavy mineral sands. Several large Tertiary paleochannels exist that drain towards the region of interest, and it was considered that these systems may potentially have acted as sediment gathering networks supplying heavy minerals (HM) to the northern margin of the Maralinga Embayment. The Barton Range modern geomorphic feature represents a past marine transgressive margin within the Eucla Basin, and is thought to have been a site for concentrated wave action and deposition of HM. Geographically it lies approximately 400 km from Ceduna and approximately 200 km from the Jacinth-Ambrosia commercial HM projects currently in operation. Iluka's 2010 PACE-subsidised drilling project was successful, encountering accumulations of HM that grade above 1%, hosted in near-shore marine sands. The area of highest HM concentration identified has been named the Thar prospect (best result obtained in hole MAR0370, which intersected 7.5 m @ 3.58% HM, with +20% zircon content as a visual estimate). The HM appears to have accumulated in a south-west facing bay, in a similar setting to the Jacinth deposit. After subsequently obtaining approvals for conducting follow-up resource definition drilling, the Thar prospect was closely traverse drilled to test the extent of the mineralisation, with 128 vertical aircore/RC holes, for a total penetration of 4671.1 m, put in at 100 m intervals along six lines spaced 800 m apart. It was found that the Thar mineralisation is unlikely to be economic as it is thinly developed (~5 m thick on average) and occurs beneath approximately 30 m of younger cover, and directly below a thin hard silcrete horizon. However, the infill drilling programme demonstrated that the local fine grained littoral sediment sequence is prospective for HM accumulation, despite its depth of burial, and warrants further exploration drilling, especially adjacent to Thar on the eastern side. The regional component of the 2010 PACE drilling programme, which totalled 209 holes for 8607 m put in along eight traverses, was designed to give Iluka an improved understanding of the potential for HM accumulations along currently interpreted shorelines, and in particular, to provide information about the nature of lateral facies changes along these shorelines. This work also proved to be successful, by delineating the extent of prospective marine sands that could potentially host HM deposits within the region. Further drilling on these prospective areas is also warranted.