ENGINEERS from Nasa have developed a concept package for exploring the distant moons for alien life.
The scientific community widely believes that one moon orbiting Jupiter and another orbiting Saturn have oceans.
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Nasa Ethan Schaler has proposed an ambitious plan to deploy a team of tiny probes into space oceans hidden below 10 miles of ice.
“My idea is, where can we take miniaturised robotics and apply them in interesting new ways for exploring our solar system?” Schaler said.
The goal would be to construct robots just five inches long for swimming in off-world oceans and passing what they find along a communications chain back to Earth.
Space exploration’s most ambitious chapter has just begun as rocket technology becomes more streamlined.
Supporting projects in early development like Schaler’s gives humanity the best chance to find other life in the Solar System – if it exists.
The Sensing with Independent Micro-swimmers (SWIM) plan calls for a “cryobot” to be packed with the tiny probes and plunged through the icy shell.
The cyrobot is connected to a surface-based communications tower for Earth-bound operators – while this system can’t be moved, the engineers argue the mini-bots in the water will collect more accurate data as a group.
“With a swarm of small swimming robots, we are able to explore a much larger volume of ocean water and improve our measurements by having multiple robots collecting data in the same area,” Schaler said.
IET reported that the swimming bots could be engineered to group together “in a behavior inspired by fish or birds” – if achieved, it would be an example of man-made robots imitating Earth-bound life on another planet.
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The project received a grant of $600,000 from Nasa’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.
“NIAC Fellows are known to dream big, proposing technologies that may appear to border science fiction and are unlike research being funded by other agency programs,” an executive close to the NIAC selection committee said when Schaler’s plan was first accepted.
In a pitch published by Nasa, Schaler said the Phase II funding would also be used for designing simulations and sensors for an off-world environment.
Jupiter’s Europa was discovered in 1610 by famed astronomer Galileo – Nasa flew by the small, icy dot several times in the 1970s and theorized there may be water beneath a shell.
In 2024, Nasa’s Europa Clipper mission will embark on a flyby of Jupiter’s moon with the search for life as a top priority.
