Something just like the 14-foot-long robotic may sometime be used to autonomously seek for life on icy moons in our photo voltaic system.
A workforce at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is creating and testing a snake-like robotic known as EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor). Credit: NASA/JPL
Despite residing within the frigid outer realm of our photo voltaic system the place the Sun is only a faraway speck of sunshine, icy moons like Saturn’s Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa are thought-about a number of the most tantalizing locations to seek for alien life — due to liquid oceans sloshing beneath their frozen surfaces.
Exploring such worlds received’t be simple although their astrobiological potential. Spacecraft have flown by the moons, at instances they zip by means of geysers like these on Enceladus that blast into house by means of cracks in its ice-covered floor, however no probe has ever explored these orbs in situ.
A brand new snake-like robotic being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) may sometime assist scientists do exactly that.
The 14-foot-long robotic, named Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), is at the moment in its third yr of improvement and has a purpose to autonomously navigate icy surfaces and discover areas which can be in any other case inaccessible to traditional, four-wheeled robots. The serpent-shaped robotic has a “head” infused with cameras and sensors, together with a laser-based system that creates maps of its atmosphere — the identical approach autonomous automobiles can map out the world. The robotic’s “body” is comprised of individual modules linked collectively that may host science devices. It additionally has spiral connectors all through the physique to propel the robotic ahead.
EELS can get to locations some rovers can’t
This know-how, described in a paper printed in Science Robotics, permits EELS to traverse on flat floor, wrap itself round an object to inch forward, and tunnel by means of a slender passage, thus altering its form to get out and in of areas the place a standard rover can be too massive to suit.
“It represents very impressive state-of-the-art engineering,” says Manasvi Lingam, an astrobiologist on the Florida Institute of Technology. The robotic remains to be in its early levels of improvement and is at the moment not a part of any NASA mission. If it had been to be despatched to discover Enceladus, nonetheless, it might have to tunnel by means of a number of kilometers of ice to achieve the moon’s subsurface ocean — a difficult process, he says, however “it might be able to search for biosignatures frozen in the surface ice.”
To perceive how EELS navigates unfamiliar terrains, particularly dimly lit ones the place the robotic’s cameras can’t create a superb map of its environment, you’ll be able to think about walking right into a room with lights off, says EELS venture supervisor at JPL Matt Robinson. “If you’re not that familiar with the room, you can slow down and use your sense of touch to figure out where you’re going.”
EELS is programmed to carry out the identical motion with its sensors whereas it offers enter about simply how a lot it’s pushing towards its atmosphere, says Robinson. On locations like Enceladus or Europa that are almost a billion miles from Earth, the engineers can’t “joystick the robot” in real-time as a result of it might take an hour to ship a command and one other hour to get a response. Hence, the need of autonomy. Robinson mentioned his workforce has outfitted the robotic with the potential to acknowledge when it’s caught. It can then use a mixture of visible cues and sensors to both push ahead or change its form to free itself, all with out human help.
“Imagine a car driving autonomously, but there are no stop signs, no traffic signals, not even any roads,” mentioned the venture’s autonomy lead Rohan Thakker in a JPL assertion. “The robot has to figure out what the road is and try to follow it. Then it needs to go down a 100-foot drop and not fall.”
While EELS’ modern design and flexibility are impressed by the will to wiggle by means of slender, plume-blasting vents on Enceladus, its engineers envision variations of the robotic to additionally scope out cave-like constructions on the Moon the place astronauts could discover shelter or discover hard-to-reach areas on Earth itself.
“There are dozens of textbooks about how to design a four-wheel vehicle, but there is no textbook about how to design an autonomous snake robot to boldly go where no robot has gone before,” mentioned EELS principal investigator at JPL Hiro Ono. “We have to write our own. That’s what we’re doing now.”
