The US space agency has unveiled a prototype rover for exploring icy underwater regions. Scientists hope the rover may fly as far as Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has a vast subsurface ocean long thought to harbor life.
Called the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration (BRUIE), the
nifty tool comes packed with an array of sensors and instruments,
as well as the same NASA software used in the Mars Cube One – the
nano-spacecraft intended for fly-by surveys of the Red Planet in
2016. It will use a powerful laser to blast through thick ice and
burrow its way inside.
At the moment, the thermos-looking machine is sitting at the
bottom of the California Science Center’s 188,000-gallon aquatic
tank in Los Angeles, but it will in future get wheels and be able
to negotiate beneath icy surfaces as though it were on the
ground.
The tool can already be used for exploring the Arctic and the
Antarctic, but diver and principal investigator Andy Klesh of
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has bigger plans for it,
and they involve possibly the most eagerly awaited mission by the
space agency after its success on Mars.
“A lot of what we do in deep space is applicable to the
ocean,” he says. “This is an early prototype for
vehicles that could one day go to Europa and other planetary
bodies with a liquid ocean covered by ice. It’s ideal for
traveling under the ice shelf of an icy world.”
BRUIE is important in studying the interface between ice and
water, researchers with the JPL explain.
“Our work aims to build a bridge between exploring extreme
environments in our own ocean and the exploration of distant,
potentially habitable oceans elsewhere in the solar system,”
co-investigator and planetary scientist at JPL, Kevin Hand, says.
Dan Berisford, John Leichty and Josh Schoolcraft at JPL are the
other co-investigators on the rover project.
READ MORE:
Search for life: NASA begins work on mission to Jupiter moon
Europa
An early version of the device was tested underwater in 2012, on
the inhospitable Matanuska glacier, in Alaska. The researchers
made a hole in the ice and sent the rover underwater without so
much as a tether. That is because the machine can be piloted
remotely, and that was “the first time an under-ice vehicle
had been operated via satellite,” Klesh says.
The new version is both longer and resistant to greater depths of
about 200 meters (700 feet). It contains computers, sensors,
communication equipment and a set of instruments for sampling and
analyzing its surroundings.
Work is currently being done on increasing the rover’s autonomy,
testing how it gathers data and takes photos.
“We’re a long way off from exploring Europa’s ocean, but the
young children visiting the California Science Center and seeing
our robot could be the ones building the vehicles that go
there,” Hand revealed.
Just a few days ago, NASA announced the mission to Europa is
finally not a concept, but a real and workable idea.
Last week, NASA announced that its plan to survey Europa has been
successfully reviewed by the agency and that it is now in the
“formulation stage.”
“Europa is the most likely place to find life in our solar
system today because we think there’s a liquid water ocean
beneath its surface,” said Robert Pappalardo, a Europa
mission project scientist, in a video released by NASA. “We
know that on Earth, everywhere that there’s water, we find life.
So could Europa have the ingredients to support life?”
READ MORE: Jupiter’s moon sprays water vapors 200km into
air
Scientists witnessed back in 2013 Europa’s magnificent water
vapors, shooting 200km up into the air.
The dominant theory, currently, is that this is caused by water
eruptions on the surface of the icy moon. In combination with
another study, which found minerals critical to life on the
surface, scientists can begin to examine the interaction of
chemicals above and below the moon’s surface.
In short, all the building blocks for life are there, but a
closer look is required to understand their interaction. The hard
part is getting underneath all that ice, presently thought to be
10-20 miles thick.
NASA is currently testing several technologies and devices that
should allow advanced drilling and underwater exploring in the
future. Just one of the 15 proposals in the agency’s foray into
sci-fi territory is a squid-type underwater craft, conceptualized
with Europa in mind.