It is going to take a lot more than paddling to explore the oceans, which is hidden below the icy surfaces of the most intriguing moons of some of the solar system.
BRUIE Project
That is why the engineers of NASA are already in the process of working on an underwater rover they are hoping could overcome one day the challenges posed by ocean worlds just like Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. For a few years now, a team has been working on a robot, called Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration or BRUIE. NASA is creating a prototype that of a rover of Antarctica for testing in the most similar environments found on the planet Earth.
Kevin Hand, the lead scientist on the BRUIE project at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in NASA California, said, "The ice shells covering these distant oceans serve as a passageway into the oceans below. Here on Earth, the ice covering our polar oceans serves a similar role, and our team is particularly interested in what is happening where the water meets the ice."
Testing of the project
The trial will take place in Casey's research station on Australia along the coast of Antarctica, where BRUIE will be spending a month exploring the ocean and the inland lakes as well.
Andy Klesh, the lead engineer of the project, mentioned in the same statement, "We have discovered that life often lives at interfaces, both sea bottom and the ice-water interface at the top."
BRUIE is designed to overcome these challenges through buoyancy - it crawls along the ice bottom, being held up by below the denser water. The rover itself is a bar that measures up to 3 feet long, with a large wheel on both ends.
The robot of NASA is also designed to turn itself on and off whenever needed between gathering measurements scientists are most fascinated in. Without recharging, it will stay locked below the ice for long periods of time. With these features, the team behind BRUIE is expecting to develop the project into a model that can spend months exploring and observing below ice sheets from 6 to 12 miles thick - this is the sort of situation a rover would need to survive on situations such as on distant moons that NASA is targeting.
For early tests, BRUIE will explore underwater by itself, and also tied to ice to refrain from getting lost. Hence, in the long run, the rover is not designed just to rove, but it will also carry instruments such as two cameras, measurements, water temperature, and oxygen levels. As data from BRUIE's excursions came out, scientists will now be able to distinguish when to include instruments into the tests.
But with all this testing in the world, it cannot and would not prepare BRUIE for the biggest challenge of exploration: realizing potential signs that could look nothing like Earth.
Dan Berisford, a mechanical engineer on the BRUIE project, stated in the NASA statement, "We just know how to detect life which is similar to Earth. So it is possible that very different microbres may be hard to recognize."
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