NASA is making swift design improvements to its Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) probe concept, which aims to investigate the subsurface ocean of Enceladus and detect potential organisms residing there.
The subsurface oceans on icy celestial bodies like Enceladus and Europa are situated below layers of ice that are several kilometers thick. Drilling through the ice shell to reach the subsurface ocean would pose a challenge to any probe.
Therefore, NASA engineers developed a creative idea to create a bioinspired robot that can crawl through geysers that spew water on these icy worlds and penetrate the oceans.
The EELS robot concept is being developed to traverse the most challenging terrain throughout the Solar System and explore uncharted territories. Its serpentine design allows it to navigate through difficult landscapes, such as sand and ice dunes, steep cliffs, craters, lava tubes, and crevices within extraterrestrial glaciers.
The team has been creating new prototypes since 2019, and the current model is four meters long and weighs 100 kilograms. It uses screw threads for propulsion, traction, and grip.
Although the engineers have not yet finalized the scientific instruments to be incorporated into the ultimate version of EELS, they are evaluating the available options.
The robot underwent testing in a variety of environments, including sandy, snowy, and icy terrains. As EELS is intended for remote exploration in environments with significant signal transmission delays, the robot is primarily configured for autonomous operation.
It can sense its surroundings, collect data using its instruments, constantly evaluate the risks of its movements, and select the most promising areas to investigate next. In the event of any unexpected situations, the robot is also capable of self-recovery without any human intervention.
