A swarm of swimming robots looking for extraterrestrial life. Nasa has now shown a concept called “SWIM” which is intended to explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
The search for life in space has been going on for a long time. At Nasa, it is thought that swimming micro-robots will be able to do the job. There, a new concept called “Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers” has now been given the green light to continue to develop.
Behind the concept are the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ethan Schaler, whose team now receives $ 600,000 to go to the prototype stage.
The big difference between this concept and many others that Nasa is working with is that these are devices that are very small. This means that an imaginary space probe can have most robots loaded.
The target of these SWIM robots is Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn ditto Encleadus. Two moons that have been believed to have oceans under a blanket of ice and where the latter is described as one of the most likely locations in the solar system for alien microbial life.
– My thought is, where can we take a mini robot and use it in an interesting way to explore our solar system. With a swarm of small swimming robots, we can explore much larger volumes of seawater and improve our measurements by having multiple robots collecting data in the same area, says Ethan Schaler in a statement.
Moon lander on the ice
The actual space mission they are to perform sounds fascinating to say the least. In the first stage, a lunar lander will land on the surface ice. This sends out a probe that by means of heat will melt a tunnel through the ice down to the liquid water. Once there, the probe will open and 50 swimming robots will begin their mission to explore the ocean.
Each robot is wedge-shaped and about twelve centimeters long. In addition to having a driveline and sensors to be able to swim and navigate, it also has scientific equipment on board to measure temperature, salinity, acid, pressure and other chemicals.
If the robots move like shoals, they can measure things like temperature and salinity by overlapping data and thus minimizing errors.
The swimming robots are fascinating, but are so far not included in any Nasa mission. The money you have now received will be used to build and test prototypes of the robots.
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