The glacier Matanuska Alaska may not seem like the most glamorous place in the world, but for NASA it has become the perfect testing ground. Here, amid freezing temperatures and extreme conditions, engineers have tested an exploratory robot that could forever change our understanding of life in the universe.
It's not just a rover: It is an integrated system capable of drilling, analyzing and deciding autonomously. Its goal? Europe, that moon of Jupiter that hides an ocean under kilometers of ice.
An exploratory robot that “thinks” for itself
“It” does not need to wait for orders from Earth: this is why it was built, NASA has thought about what can work to explore Europa. The team has Integrated standalone control software with drilling hardware to penetrate that icy surface in search of the first samples potentially containing life.
The exploratory robot has a particular structure: four sturdy legs, two articulated arms and a “head” full of stereo cameras. It almost looks like a giant mechanical insect, but each component has a specific purpose. The cameras capture visual information of the environment, while the arms can mount various tools to dig, extract and collect samples.
Why Alaska is Perfect for Testing
The Matanuska Glacier was not chosen at random. The tests focused not only on individual tools but also on how the entire integrated system performed in a real-world environment. The conditions in Alaska mimic fairly well what the rover will encounter on Europa: thick ice, polar temperatures, and unpredictable terrain.
Already during the very first tests of the July 2022, the exploratory robot collected samples from different sites with variable slopes, different ice depths and irregular gravel distribution. All this in complete autonomy. Today, however, it has surpassed itself by demonstrating autonomous and end-to-end sampling capability with the lander (that is, with hardware that simulated the lander: Olaf, this is the name of the lander, is still in the NASA garage. You can see a reconstruction of it in the cover image of this article).
Autonomy is everything
On Europa you cannot call technical support. The distance from Earth creates enormous communication delays, and extreme conditions require immediate decisions. Joseph Bowkett, lead author of the study published in Science Robotics, explains that the lander model had significantly greater autonomy than that typically used on existing Mars rovers and landers, especially given the limited mission time and the high power required to communicate with Earth.
Europe in the crosshairs
Europa is one of the most promising places to look for life in our solar system. Beneath its icy crust lies an ocean that contains more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. Europa can host in its liquid body life of all kinds, from the microbial one onwards.
The exploratory robot will have to dig about 10 centimeters below the surface, where the complex chemistry of materials from the ocean below would be shielded from the harmful radiation that exists in the space around Jupiter.
As we have pointed out in this article on Europa Clipper, the mission will arrive in 2030 but will only fly above the surface. An exploratory robot like the one tested in Alaska would represent the next step: actually touching that alien world and searching for the secrets of life.
The tests in Alaska show that we are closer than we think to this extraordinary goal.
