Aurora was built in the French town of Le Creusot, close to Lyon, in authority of the French-Dutch building consortium Bouygues/Koop. From Le Cruesot, Aurora was shipped to the Netherlands in parts. Here Aurora was assembled in the start shaft to set its teeth in the Dutch soil in November 2001, in January 2004 she saw the daybreak.

When Aurora's work in the Netherlands was finished, it was disassembled and transported to China for a new job: two tunnels under a river in Shanghai.

The drill chuck weighs 1.9 million kilos and has a diameter of 14.87 metres. The cutter-wheel alternatively turns to the right and left, scraping the sand away. A natural type of clay, bentonite, is pumped in front of the drill chuck. This bentonite functions as a lubricant around the chuck, but also provides support for the earth in front of the cutter-wheel.

The mixture of sand and bentonite, called slurry, is drained away from the front of drill chuck and conveyed out of the tunnel. A separator separates the bentonite as much as possible from the sand, so that the bentonite can be reused. The released sand is used for other projects. 

Boring carried on twenty hours a day, seven days a week. The four remaining hours of each day were used to carry out preventive maintenance on the TBM. This was done to minimise any unplanned standstill. 

The cutter-wheel is powered by fourteen electric motors. The power of the motors is transferred mechanically to the cutter-wheel. Aurora guzzled up 3500 kW per hour, a little more than the amount of electricity that an average Dutch family consumes in a year! The peak capacity of the TBM was set to 8000kW per hour. Little wonder that Aurora had its own power supply, which was tapped directly from the high-voltage cable nearby.

Behind Aurora's drill chuck was a rolling of around 80 metres long. This bridge rested on two trailers on caterpillars. The TBM bored approximately two metres per hour. At its deepest point, it was at 35 metres below Normal Amsterdam Water Level and bored through Pleistocene sand layers (over 10,000 years old). After having bored for an hour, the TBM then built a concrete ring lining the tunnel wall. So besides boring, Aurora can build as well. From outside the tunnel, the curved concrete elements that make up the definitive tunnel wall were supplied. A single element weighs approximately 14 tons; in total 35,000 elements were needed to build 7 kilometres of tunnel. Those elements were supplied in trucks with special tyres, after which an equally special crane lifted the elements to the face of the tunnel. Here the so-called erector, basically a rotating and extendable arm weighing more than 100 tons, integrated the elements into the wall.

Ten elements together make up a single closed ring that is two metres wide. The elements are connected to the previously fitted elements with bolts. As soon as the ring was built in, Aurora could continue boring. At the same time, work was done on a technology duct on the tunnel floor: a cable conduit more than 2 metres high, which was later covered with a concrete floor. On top of this floor, the infrastructure provider builds the railway construction.

At a later stage, the partition wall was build. In a single operation, 12 metres of concrete wall were poured. The end result was a double-track tunnel. Of course the TBM had to follow the projected route. For this reason, the TBM was guided with the aid of laser. The driver's cabin was situated right behind the drill chuck.  From there the driver could control all crucial functions of the machine and monitor if Aurora kept to the planned route. 
Aurora dug and built for almost 2.5 years; in January 2004 it reached its final mark.

Total weight of Aurora: 3.1 million kilos 
Length: 120 metres
Diameter: 14.87 metres
Consumption of electricity per hour: 3500kWh, peak capacity 8000 kWh
Average bored distance per day: 12 to 20 metres
Weight of drill chuck: 1,932,000 kilos
Rotating speed drill chuck: 0.7 rotations per minute 
Number of boring hours per day: 20
Number of maintenance hours per day: 4
In the tunnel boring process, 2 million tons of sand were released (i.e. 100,000 trucks, each carrying 10 to 12 cubic metres).