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Cryobot Technology Delivers Science Instruments into Icy Environments

The ice of Europa and Mars offers exciting possibilities for exploration, including the exceptional challenge of delivering in situ science instruments, either just below the surface or deep into subsurface environments.

To address this, the Cryobot moves through ice by melting the surface directly in front of it, while allowing the liquid to flow around the vehicle and refreeze behind it. As it makes this passage, its instruments take measurements of the encountered environment and send the collected data back to the surface lander. For terrestrial applications and on Mars, it appears that a communications cable could be used for penetration of shallower depths. This cable would be quite small in diameter and stowed in the rear of the vehicle. As the vehicle descends, the cable is payed out so that the refreezing ice does not entrap it. On Europa, the thicker ice would require use of mini-radiowave ice transceiver relays.

This is the first known combination of an active and passive melting system used together in this type of application. The Cryobot method of "drilling" is more effective than conventional augering because it uses less power than mechanical cutting. Melting the ice and moving through the resulting liquid makes it easier for the probe to make its journey. A semi-autonomous steering system, with built-in fault management, helps reduce the risk of the probe becoming entrapped by obstructions such as rocks or other debris.

The probe successfully demonstrated some of these new technologies by moving through an ice column of approximately 15 feet (5 meters) on September 18, 2000.

One Cryobot technology development program goal is to use this mobile science platform to penetrate the Mars northern polar ice cap, in order to better understand Martian climate history and search for past or extant life. Another opportunity to prove this technology could be to explore a mysterious lake buried deep under the Antarctic ice. Lake Vostok is believed to contain water millions of years old, which may be the home of ancient organisms. This hidden body of freshwater is the size of Lake Ontario and is the largest of 70 bodies of water first detected under the polar ice-sheet in the 1970s.

The plan is to send a Cryobot down through the ice 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) to visit this body of water. The cryobot would not contaminate the hidden lake the way anti-freeze fluid would from conventional drilling operations. In an additional technology advance, a remotely-operated probe equipped with a camera - perhaps accompanying the Cryobot or released from it - would dive into the lake to explore the sediment, which could be up to 40 million years old. Because there is the possibility that this lake was sealed after the ice sheet formed over the South Pole countless years ago, and has not been exposed to the atmosphere since, there may be ancient microbes examine.

Scientists exploring the Antarctic's microworld locked in ancient ice - using conventional coring techniques - have already found a wide range of unusually formed life forms from fungi, algae and bacteria to a few diatoms. Researchers also describe seeing, "some really bizarre things - things that we've never seen before."