Centimeter-Scale Robots for Accessing Europa's Benthic Zone

Europa's subsurface ocean is the best place in our solar system to search for extraterrestrial life and and investigate the mechanisms behind life's origins on Earth. The most important ocean region on Europa is the seafloor benthic zone, where geothermal activity may create habitable conditions similar to hydrothermal vents in Earth's benthic zone. Accessing these regions on Europa is an unsolved technical challenge involving traversal through 20 km-scale ice sheets and 100 km-scale oceans. NASA is maturing technologies for shallow ocean access on Europa, but the extraordinary ocean depth and resulting hydrostatic pressures prevent benthic access by any technology currently being developed. Deep ocean vehicles on Earth have demonstrated capabilities to survive 100 MPa-scale pressure with advanced sensor payloads and good endurance, but are orders of magnitude too large to feasibly transport across Europa's ice layer. Small benthic vehicles for Europa have not been developed, and the constitutive technologies are under-explored. A new class of Earth-independent exploration autonomy is also required due to large communication delays and the challenges of communicating across ice and ocean layers. This proposal describes a centimeter-scale, pressure tolerant, autonomous robot system as the most feasible path to explore Europa's benthic zone. This research will address the most fundamental challenges in the path of this robotic technology: (1) pressure tolerance by small, spherical glass pressure vessels that protect minitiarized autonomous underwater vehicles and (2) low-power, low-computation autonomy architectures that are tailored for benthic environments. This research will develop both algorithms and mechanisms, and will utilize both simulation and physical experiments that are uniquely supported by the robots developed in prior graduate research. This work supports NASA's roadmap for exploration of Europa and other ocean worlds including Enceladus and Titan. The proposed research is directly relevant to the EXPLORE strategic framework within the Autonomous Systems and Robotics thrust.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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