Zero things better than launching a submarine to Europa

[Cypress]

Government spending - from the Republican perspective, a wasteful Kenyan-Marxist travesty.
From my perspective - totally bad ass!

Scientists Proposed a Nuclear 'Tunnelbot' to Hunt Life in Europa's Hidden Ocean

A group of scientists wants to send a nuclear-powered "tunnelbot" to Europa to blaze a path through the Jovian moon's thick shell of ice and search for life.

Europa, the fourth largest of Jupiter's 53 moons, is one of the best candidates in our solar system for hosting alien life. Researchers believe that its icy crust hides a liquid water ocean and that vents through that crust might deliver the necessary heat and chemical ingredients for life into that ocean.To peek beneath that thick veil of ice, researchers on the NASA Glenn Research COMPASS team (a group of scientists and engineers scattered around the country and tasked with solving problems for NASA) think they have come up with the tunnelbot.

On Friday (Dec. 14) at the 2018 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, the researchers presented a proposal for a "tunnelbot" that would use nuclear power to melt a path through Europa's shell, "carrying a payload that can search for… evidence for extant/extinct life."

The tunnelbot, the researchers reported, could use either an advanced nuclear reactor or some of NASA's radioactive "general-purpose heat bricks" to generate heat and power, though the radiation would present some design challenges.

Once on the frozen moon, the tunnelbot would move through the ice, also hunting for smaller lakes inside the shell or evidence that the ice itself might contain life. As it burrows deeper, it would spit out a long fiber-optic cable behind itself leading up to the surface and deploy communications relays at depths of 3, 6 and 9 miles (5, 10 and 15 kilometers).

Once it reaches the liquid ocean, to keep from "falling through," it would deploy cables or a floatation device to lock itself in place, the researchers wrote.

https://www.livescience.com/64322-europa-life-nuclear-tunnelbot.html

 

[Cypress]

The one thing that might actually be cooler than landing a submarine probe on Europa, would be landing helicopter drones on Saturn's moon Titan.

Aerospace engineers developing drone for NASA concept mission to Titan

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Researchers from the Penn State Department of Aerospace Engineering are part of a team led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) whose proposal for a revolutionary rotorcraft to investigate Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has been selected by NASA as one of two finalists for the agency’s next New Frontiers mission.

Dragonfly, a drone-like multi-rotor lander, would take advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere (four times denser than Earth’s atmosphere) and low gravity (one-seventh of Earth's) to fly between widely-spaced landing sites on Titan’s surface. At each landing site, Dragonfly would employ a suite of science instruments to investigate Titan’s organic chemistry and habitability; monitor atmospheric and surface conditions; image landforms to investigate geological processes; and perform seismic studies.

https://news.psu.edu/story/500074/2...s-developing-drone-nasa-concept-mission-titan

 

[Cypress]

NASA tests underwater rover that will seek out alien life on watery moons of Jupiter and Saturn

Designing a rover to trundle over the arid surface of Mars is challenging enough, but building a robot that can explore the ocean depths of faraway moons is an arguably trickier task.

Scientists now believe that watery worlds like Enceladus - which orbits Saturn - or Jupiter’s moon Europa, hold the best conditions for finding alien life in the Solar System.

While upcoming Mars missions may uncover fossils of ancient life forms dating back billions of years, living organisms could still be thriving in the seas of volcanically active satellites.

Hunting for extraterrestrial life in uncharted alien oceans is fraught with problems, not least because any probe must navigate solo beneath ice sheets that could be up to 12 miles thick, through which no signal could penetrate.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science...ater-rover-will-seek-alien-life-watery-moons/