One day, a fleet of steam robots could be used to explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn “leaping giant across their frozen landscapes.”
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing small soccer ball-sized spherical robots equipped with steam thrusters for future exploration.
If they ever move beyond the initial concept stage, the robots would allow scientists to explore icy moons like Europa and Enceladus in orbit around Jupiter and Saturn.
These moons are believed to harbor oceans of liquid water in the salty subsoil, but very little is known about their surface, making it potentially challenging terrain for a traditional lunar rover, but easy for a steam powered robotic ball .
The bots, called SPARROWs, would run on steam from the ice collected by mining the surfaces of the moons they explore, rather than ‘dirty’ rocket fuel.
Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are developing small soccer ball-sized spherical robots equipped with steam thrusters for future exploration; they would have the support of a lander that would extract ice from the surface to power the robot
The robots will allow scientists to explore the icy moons of gaseous giants like Europa, Enceladus, and Titan, which can harbor salty liquid oceans below their surface.
This is just a theoretical idea at the moment, no robots have been built and the study of how it would work was through computer simulations, but the researchers hope that one day these distant frozen moons will be used on a mission.
The Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robots for Ocean Worlds (SPARROW) devices would be used to make great leaps across the icy terrains found on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Both are believed to harbor vast underground saltwater oceans under a thick crust of ice, according to astronomers who have studied images of moons.
While that makes them fascinating for scientific study, the little we know about their surfaces could also make navigating them especially challenging, NASA said.
SPARROW robots would be the size of a soccer ball and would include a system of propellers, avionics, and instruments enclosed in a protective spherical cage.
According to the NASA team, in the type of low-gravity environment found on those distant icy moons, there would be no atmospheric resistance to slow it down.
This would allow SPARROW to take leaps of many miles over landscapes that other robots would have difficulty navigating.
“The terrain in Europe is very complex,” said Gareth Meirion-Griffith, a JPL robotist and principal investigator of the concept.
“It could be porous, it could be riddled with cracks, there could be penitents six feet high,” long sheets of ice that form at Earth’s high latitudes, “that would stop most robots,” he said.
But SPARROW has total agnosticism of the terrain; You have complete freedom to travel through inhospitable terrain. ”
Saturn’s moon Enceladus is a small, icy body that could have an ocean of deep salty liquid water beneath its icy frozen surface
This is just a theoretical idea at the moment, no robots have been built and the study of how it would work has been through computer simulations, but the researchers hope that one day they will be used on a mission in these distant frozen moons.
The Steam Propelled Autonomous Retrieval Robots for Ocean Worlds (SPARROW) devices would be used to make great leaps across the icy terrains found on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
The concept relies on a lander that serves as SPARROW’s base of operations that extracts the ice and melts it before loading it onto the jump robot.
SPARROW then heats the water inside its engines, creating bursts of steam to propel the surface, according to its developers.
When it is low on fuel, the jump robot would return to the lander for a recharge, while also leaving the scientific samples for further analysis.
To maximize the scientific research that could be done, many SPARROWs could be shipped together, swarming around a specific location.
They could also split up to explore as much alien terrain as possible.
In 2018, SPARROW received funding from Phase I of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which nurtures visionary ideas that could one day be used in future space missions.
Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is an ideal candidate for the search for life due to the fact that it is expected to have an ocean of deep liquid water below the surface
SPARROW robots would be the size of a soccer ball and would include a system of propellers, avionics, and instruments enclosed in a protective spherical cage
The Phase I studies explore the general viability of the idea and advance the Technological Preparation Level, in anticipation of the tender for the financing of Phase II.
For SPARROW, funding from Phase I enabled the development and testing of different water-based thruster systems that could be used to produce steam in the most efficient way.
Furthermore, the SPARROW team was able to better understand how the spherical robot could fall when landing on icy and chaotic terrain using computer simulations, thus identifying the most efficient launch angle and jump speed.
“From this, and related propulsion calculations, we were able to determine that a single long jump would be more efficient than several smaller jumps,” they said.
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