NASA will use this weird snake-like robot to search for life in Saturn’s frozen ocean

Frozen Moon SaturnEnceladus is considered one of the most attractive search sites Alien life Because the liquid ocean is “sloshing” beneath its frozen surface.

Of course, getting there is a difficult task, not only because we are millions of kilometers away from Enceladus, but also because it is a place that cannot be explored with a classic four-wheeled rover. Based on this premise, NASA scientists proposed a special snake-like robot.

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This is EELS (Exobiology Existing Life Surveyor Or, in Spanish, the Alien Existing Life Detector), which was developed to reach hard-to-reach places and search for possible life forms. The robot has demonstrated its ability to traverse narrow spaces and descend vertically between ice wells, a landscape similar to what it will face on Enceladus. The site chosen for these tests was the Athabasca Glacier in Canada.

This robot looks like it’s crawling like a snake. Its head is equipped with cameras and sensors, including a laser-based system that creates a map of its environment, just as self-driving cars can map the world. The robot’s body is made up of individual modules connected together to house scientific instruments and has spiral connectors throughout the body to propel the robot forward.

The autonomy of EELS is also demonstrated by the following facts: Can make independent decisions without human interaction. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait hours for urgent issues to be resolved due to communication delays between Earth and space.

Designed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), The robot has 48 motors in different modules from one end to the other.“It has the ability to go places other robots can’t go,” explained Matthew Robinson, a JPL scientist and member of the EELS development team. “While some robots are better at a particular type of terrain, the idea of ​​EELS is to be able to explore all of them,” he concluded.

The gears allow you to grip difficult surfaces, The team has been working on the robot since 2019. Currently, EELS weighs about 100 kilograms and is 4 meters long.

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Several universities, including Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and UC San Diego, participated in the development along with NASA. While the elegant design and versatility of EELS were inspired by the desire to traverse the cramped, explosive spaces on Enceladus, Its engineers envision that versions of the robot could also explore cave-like structures on the moon, where astronauts could find shelter or explore further to reach areas of the planet itself..

“There are dozens of textbooks on how to design four-wheeled vehicles, but There are currently no textbooks on how to design an autonomous snake robot that boldly goes where no robot has ever gone before.“We had to write our own,” said EELS Principal Investigator Hiro Ono. “That’s what we’re doing now,” they noted.

Once he Exobiology Existing Life Surveyor is in the best position to advance its mission, NASA will send it to Saturn via a spacecraft in about twelve years.

Argentina “State”, GDA