NASA Wants to Explore the Cold Moons of Jupiter and Saturn with Autonomous Robots

Europa’s orbit is an ellipse, and the shape of the satellite is affected by Jupiter’s gravity, which is deformed when it passes close to Jupiter.

This change in temperature creates friction within Europa, generating massive amounts of heat known as ocean heat, which melts some of the ice and creates a vast interior ocean beneath the moon’s thick ice shell.

Europa’s internal ocean is highly saline and is estimated to be 100 km deep on average, with twice as much water as Earth’s oceans, despite the moon being much smaller than our planet.

In addition, internal oceans are believed to exist on Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Callisto and Saturn’s moons Titan and Enceladus.

Liquid water is essential to life as we know it, which is why marine worlds are at the forefront of the search for extraterrestrial life.

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Ice Explorer is a spacecraft that will be used to explore the ice on Jupiter.

Photo: ESA/M. Pedoussaut

Under the Ice

The autonomous underwater exploration robots envisioned by SWIM are very small. Their slender bodies are about 12 inches long. A machine called a “cryobot” will carry robots under the moon’s ice caps, using nuclear energy to melt the ice. The idea is to pack about a dozen robots into a cryobot and have them enter a thick ice shell over the course of a few years.

Conceptual diagram of SWIM, with the cylindrical probe in the upper left corner.

Image: Ethan Schaler/NASA/JPL-Caltech

There are advantages to deploying such a large number of test robots. One is that they can explore a wider area. Another is that they are designed to work in groups, so that multiple robots can explore the same area in overlapping paths, reducing errors in observation data.

Each robot will be equipped with sensors to measure temperature, pressure, acidity, electrical conductivity, and chemical composition of the water it examines. All these sensors will be installed on a chip that measures just a few millimeters square.

“People might ask, why is NASA building an underwater robot to explore space?” said Ethan Schaller, project leader at NASA’s JPL, explaining the motivation behind SWIM. “Because there are places in the solar system we want to go to look for life—and we think life needs liquid water.”

This story appeared first DETAILS Japan and translated from Japanese.