In a major turn of events, NASA introduced a ground-breaking concept of tiny underwater robots.
As per NASA, these robots are designed to explore the underwater worlds of Jupiter’s moon like Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the concept named SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers) could help to understand and explore sub-surfaces of icy moon.
The SWIM robots mark a bold advancement in NASA’s mission to discover extraterrestrial life.
Ethan Schaler, principal investigator for SWIM at JPL, said in a statement, “People might ask, why is NASA developing an underwater robot for space exploration? It's because there are places we want to go in the solar system to look for life, and we think life needs water.”
The robot tested in a pool measures around 16.5 inches in length and weighs just over two kilograms.
NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which is scheduled for 2030, will conduct flybys to explore the possibility of life in Europa’s subsurface ocean.
Complementing this, the SWIM project introduces a swarm of cell-phone-sized robots designed to investigate beneath the moon’s thick ice crust.
Once it reached into Europa’s ocean by an ice-penetrating cryobot, the robots would spread out to search for life by detecting chemical signals and temperatures.
