Engineering news
Researchers from the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the small robot to explore the underworld of Alaska’s Matanuska glacier in July.
The primary aim of testing the bot is to potentially use it one day for mapping deep below the surface of worlds like Jupiter's moon Europa, covered in ice. "The idea is to identify and map out these underwater channels," said John Leichty, a roboticist at JPL. "We want to know if they're correlated to surface features that we can identify using satellite or overhead images."
But the robot could also be “very useful” closer to home, for exploration and rescue in extreme environments on Earth "where you don’t want to send humans,” Tariq P Sattar, a roboticist at London South Bank University, told Professional Engineering.
The researchers used a commercial-grade submersible and a “home-made” glacial probe built from off-the-shelf and 3D-printed parts. Underwater cameras and laser scans created maps of the caves.
The submersible descended 150 feet (46 meters) into a waterfall, called a moulin, on the glacier. These form below the surface of glaciers from openings where warm liquid water melts into the ice, and carry meltwater out, controlling how fast a glacier moves. They are too small and dangerous for people to access - but sending a robot down one such flooded structure has never been done before, said Sattar.
The machine could have descended further, NASA said in a statement, but the water became too cloudy for its cameras to work properly. In future, the robot might be equipped with additional acoustic sensors for mapping when the water isn't clear enough, the agency said.
The researchers are also involved in another underwater project called BRUIE (Bouyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration). In the past, they have also worked with CubeSats - tiny, modular spacecraft. "We're combining our experience with BRUIE and CubeSats and bringing that into a new area of exploration," said Andy Klesh, one of the researchers from JPL who ventured to the remote glacier with the submersible robot.