Nasa continues to pursue its mission of searching for life in outer space, this time betting on finding life in the oceans of other planets.
Space agencies can run through the water under the miles of ice shells of Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus, looking for signs of alien life. We are building a flock of “robots”.
A small robot is packed into a narrow ice-melting probe that passes through the frozen crust, releases into the water, and swims far away from the mothership to observe these new worlds.
Behind this innovative idea is Ethan Schaler, a robotics mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
His recent concept, Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM), was recently awarded $ 600,000 in Phase II funding from NASA’s Innovation Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.
The latest funding follows his 2021 prize of $ 125,000 to study feasibility and design options. Currently, Schaler and his team plan to create and test 3D-printed prototypes over the next two years.
Schaler’s mini swimmers are much smaller than other concepts of planetary ocean exploration robots and can compactly load much into ice probes. This idea is more likely to detect evidence of life while assessing potential habitability on distant ocean planets.
“In a swarm of small swimming robots, multiple robots in the same area can collect data to explore much larger amounts of seawater and improve measurements,” Schaler said.
The early SWIM concept envisions a wedge-shaped robot, each about 12 centimeters long and about 60-75 cubic centimeters in volume. Robots are the first of NASA’s missions, with about four dozen robots easily fitting into a 10-centimeter-long section of the Cryobot, accounting for about 15% of the scientific payload.
This leaves ample room for more powerful yet less mobile scientific instruments that can collect data during long journeys through ice and provide static measurements at sea.
The little robot will join NASA Europa Clipper in 2024, which is set to collect detailed science from Jupiter’s Moon in 2030.
“What if it took years to get into the ocean and then go through the ice shell in the wrong place? What if there are signs of life over there, but not where they entered the ocean?” Samuel Howell, a scientist on the SWIM team, is also involved in the Europa Clipper mission.
“By bringing a swarm of these robots with us, we can look” over there “and explore far more environments than a single Cryobot allows. .. “
SWIM supports Cryobots, just as Nasa’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter supports the institution’s Perseverance Rover on the Red Planet.
In addition, SWIM robots can “flock” in motion inspired by fish and birds, reducing data errors due to duplicate measurements.
Details: NASA satellite images show how the Russian war turned off Ukrainian lights
Details: NASA has discovered a lunar “double crater” caused by a mystery rocket collision.