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NASA has made a list of the most important things that need to be thought about when building a robot that can explore moons that are icy and have oceans of water.

NASA is making a plan for robots that could go to ocean worlds on future space trips. These robots would be able to break through the worlds’ thick, icy shells to look for life in the seas below. 

 

The space agency recently released the results of a workshop it funded in February 2023. Scientists and engineers met there to talk about possible “cryobot” mission ideas. The plan is to break through the icy surfaces of moons in the solar system, like Europa on Jupiter or Enceladus on Saturn, and drop a probe inside to study the liquid ocean below. 

 

The cryobot idea being looked at is an alternative to just drilling into a world. It involves sending a cylinder-shaped device from a mother unit to the top of an icy ocean world. This device can melt ice and then slide down as water flows around it and freezes again. 

 

These tools and this method of “thermal drilling” are usually used to study glaciers and ice caps on Earth. But the icy shells of other planets, like Europa and Enceladus, are colder and thicker. Also, they act in ways that are much harder to guess.

 

Researchers with help from NASA’s SESSA and ColdTech programmes have been working on taking current thermal drilling operations on Earth and using cryobots to take them to other planets.

 

But since then, people have learned a lot more about ocean worlds covered in ice. The workshop at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) gave scientists working on these projects a chance to get together again and make sure that these new discoveries are being incorporated into the design of robot missions.

 

But since then, people have learned a lot more about ocean worlds covered in ice. The workshop at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) gave scientists working on these projects a chance to get together again and make sure that these new discoveries are being incorporated into the design of robot missions.

 NASA

Follow the water to find life. 

 

There are many important chemicals, molecules, and elements that keep life going, but some might say that water is the most important. 

 

It’s easy to see why scientists are looking for life in other parts of the solar system. Water is an important part of supporting life on Earth. We have also learned that there is a lot of water in space (and even beyond), but the most exciting finding for astrobiologists is that the icy moons in our own solar system hold huge oceans of liquid water. 

 

NASA Finding out that Mars’ dry landscape used to be full of water is definitely an exciting chance to find the remains of ancient life. But ocean moons like Europa and Enceladus also offer the chance to find worlds that are habitable right now and may even have living things in their waters. Those live things, which are most likely microbes, would be very exciting to find.

 

NASA says that the workshop at Caltech led to the discovery of four key factors that should be used to create a plan for the creation of a robot that can explore alien water worlds. These were power, ability to handle heat, movement, and communication. 

 

The heat can be turned up with this bot, says NASA

 

The miles-thick icy shells of our ocean world gods do, of course, make it very hard for missions that are looking for life. For that reason, the core of an ocean world-exploring cryobot would need a nuclear power system that can heat up enough to melt those many miles of ice. This system would need about 10 kilowatts (kW) of power. This system would also need to be built into a building that can handle the extreme pressure of these deep alien seas. 

 

Creating such a system has been done before, no matter how complicated it sounds. Assured NASA

 

The Cassini spacecraft studied Saturn and its moons before crashing into the atmosphere of the gas giant in 2017. It had a thermal power source that could produce 14 kW, which is more than enough power to melt miles of ice. Also, in the 1960s and 1970s, Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) were put to the bottom of seas on Earth. These generators were likely strong enough to withstand the pressures of Europa’s oceans. 

 NASA Space programs future.

But the future cryobot would need to be safe from more than just its surroundings. It would also need to be safe from the heat it makes. This would need a thermal control system that can keep the bot’s inside temperature safe by transferring heat to the outside world. 

 

Scientists say that using two separate lines of pumped fluid is one way to do this. One would move an internal working fluid through tubes built into the robot’s skin, and the other would move melted ice water between the cryobot and its surroundings.

 

Systems like this have already been made by NASA, but they need a lot more work before they can be used on the icy shells of Europa or Enceladus. 

 

 

 

Those ice shells might also have elements in them, like rock and salt, that a robot would need extra systems to get through. This could be done by cutting the impurities with a machine, hitting them with high-pressure water jets, or even by doing both at the same time.

 

 

 

Of course, these methods might not be able to get past some barriers, such as big, solid rocks, salt blocks, pockets of water, or even huge holes in these icy shells. This means that a cryobot would also need to be able to find its way to the oceans below the surface. To do this, you would need to add a sensor that looks down at objects and a steering system. Both of these have been thought of before, but they haven’t been fully put together in a system that works on Earth yet. 

 

 

 

Before planning a trip to an icy ocean moon, NASA scientists will also need to come up with better ways to see obstacles in ice shells. This was a top priority for the workshop. The Europa Clipper mission, which is set to start in 2024 and get to the icy moon of Jupiter called Europa in 2030, could play a big role in this work to look into risks.

 

Getting to know each other but not talking 

 

Last but not least, the other main part of the NASA robot mission that was talked about at the Caltech meeting was a way for important data to be sent back from a deep-diving, ocean-exploring probe to a mother hub unit that was sitting on top of the ice of the ocean worlds that were being studied. 

 

 

 

Cryobots do this on Earth with fibre optic cables, but on an alien world with ice, you would have to be sure that the ice wouldn’t break the connection before you could use it. This would be especially hard to do in Enceladus’s active ice shell, which could move and shift as plumes of ocean material shoot up through cracks and into the moon’s atmosphere.

 

 

 

Kate Craft of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JPL) is looking into how ice shears on ocean moons might affect a system of communications tethers that are embedded in ice. Other teams are looking into non-physical ways to send data, like using radio waves, sound waves, and even magnetic fields to send data from the oceans through the alien ice to the surface.

 

About 40 people who came to the NASA workshop talked about these four main parts of ocean world exploring cryobots. Other things were also looked at, such as instruments that can sample and analyse collected liquids, ice anchoring systems to keep surface-based modules in place, and materials that can be used to cover the cryobot’s surface that won’t rust in alien environments.

 

The main result of the NASA mission planning exercise was that there is still a lot of work to be done, but it is possible to send cryobots to icy worlds in the solar system. 

 

 

 

In the end, this makes it more likely than ever that there is life on other planets.