Martian Observations

Deep in the Antarctic, a Russian drilling rig discovered a lake that had been covered in ice for the past million years. Lake Vostok has been untouched by outside air for an exceedingly long time and can be seen from space as a flat surface amidst a rugged, snowy landscape:



According to research, it is a freshwater lake. When the Russian team pulled out the longest ice core on record, a staggering 11,886 feet (3,623 meters), they discovered liquid water at the bottom of the hole. Geologists have theorized that geothermal heating and tectonic activity have managed to keep the water in a liquid state for so long. And then, in 1999, scientists observing the lake discovered something right out of a science fiction book.

The lake, which had not seen the surface of the planet in millions of years, teemed with microorganisms. Despite the high-oxygen environment, which would kill anything else on the planet, tiny microbial life forms have been puttering around quite contentedly for longer than human civilization has been around.

Why is this interesting, you ask. The conditions on Lake Vostok are exactly the sort of conditions on the Jovian moon Europa, whose ocean has been encased in a layer of ice anywhere from 75 - 200 km thick. Though Europa is very close to Jupiter and the intense, deadly radiation the planet puts off, an ice shield as thick as 75 km may be enough to allow life to evolve. What is needed is a robot that is capable of burrowing through ice without too much disruption of the environs, and that robot is called a cryobot.

JPL is working on a minimal-impact robot that will be able to efficiently melt ice at its nose and burrow through layers of thick ice to reach liquid water underneath. The cryobot is long and tubular, with heating plates at its nose that will melt ice, and a complex series of scientific instruments inside it that will continually run tests on samples and look for biosignals. The cryobot is set nose towards the ice and then starts heating, and slowly (about 55cm/hr) it makes its way through solid ice. The ice refreezes about 1.25m behind the robot, making sure that environmental impact is kept to a minimum, and leaving room for the bot so that it doesn't get trapped.

The cryobot is in testing stages now, with a prototype module being monitored in the Antarctic. Unfortunately, there is not much interest in going to Europa. The trip there would take a very long time, and the robot would have to be completely and utterly autonomous. While programming wouldn't be too difficult, if the robot failed completely, the project would end in disaster. There would be no way to retrieve it or fix it if the bot were on Europa. A closer prospect for the cryobot are the Martian ice caps, however. The cryobot would be more readily availible should something go wrong. A tether poking out of the ice would be able to relay information to scientists and programmers on earth, so that if the bot got into a jam, it would not be terribly disastrous to fix it.

So, Mars, Europa, and Antarctica. Seems to be a versatile bot.