![]() Europa is far colder than Earth’s polar regions. They’re working with fibre-optic tethers like those used in polar exploration to see if they can adapt them to Europa’s conditions. This is where the Signals Through the Ice (STI) team comes in. “Communication hardware faces challenging technical risks due to the expected tectonic activity within the ice shells, their challenging thermal regimes, chemistries, and tidal motions.” Signals Through the Ice Team, 2022 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference How can a tunnelling cryobot communicate with a lander through a tether when the ice is under stress and shifting and quaking? The entire mission is essentially over if the tether is damaged or severed. So Europa’s thick covering of ice is not quiescent. That means that it’s continually being resurfaced by tectonic activity. Though Europa is the smoothest-surfaced object in the Solar System, surface images of the moon show very few craters. A reasonable solution is to have the under-the-ice robot communicate with a lander that periodically uploads the data to a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter, which then communicates with Earth.īut there’s still the daunting problem of communication between the sub-surface bot and the lander. NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft is set to launch in a couple of years to explore the icy moon, but it’ll orbit Jupiter, not Europa. Jupiter is also highly radioactive, which Juno mission designers had to buttress that spacecraft against. Europa is beholden to Jupiter, and getting something to orbit Europa is difficult because of Jupiter’s gravitational power. NASA’s pretty generous and lets other nations use its system.īut the environment at Europa is much different. That means any spacecraft sending data back to Earth can always reach one of the facilities. ![]() They simply send their data to an orbiter, which relays it back to Earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN.) The DSN is a network of three facilities in the USA, Spain, and Australia about 120 ° apart. How can mission operators communicate with it during its laborious journey? How could the robot(s) communicate as they travelled downward?Īrtist’s concept of the cross-sectional view of Europa depicting the exciting, potentially habitable environment of the ocean world (Credit: K. ![]() The tunneller could encounter pockets of liquid water on its way, which could produce results sooner, but the ocean is the goal. Another idea is a cryobot that would release a swarm of tiny bots to take in-situ measurements across a wider area for better sampling. Once it broke through into the ocean, it could gather data. A cryobot would be paired with a lander and connected via a tether. The leading design candidate for tunnelling through all that ice is a nuclear-powered cryobot. It could take years for a robotic explorer to work its way through all of Europa’s ice to its buried ocean. Image Credits: NASAĮuropa’s icy shell is hard as granite. Missions to study Europa are in the planning stages. Both moons have icy shells with oceans underneath, and scientists think that Europa has more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined, and it’s likely warm and salty. Jupiter’s Europa (l) and Saturn’s Enceladus (r). ![]() And wherever we find liquid water in the Solar System, we should investigate. Though the outer layer is frozen solid, tidal flexing can heat the water closer to the core and keep it in a liquid state.
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