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NASA tests underwater rover to find life - Printable Version

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NASA tests underwater rover to find life - Kyng - 12-01-2019

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2019/12/01/nasa-tests-underwater-rover-will-seek-alien-life-watery-moons/

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.

But now Nasa has developed its first aquatic rover which can drive upside down under the sea ice, and is due to begin testing in the Antarctic.


Yeah, this sounds like a tricky thing to build. If anything, getting it to run underwater is probably the easy part... getting it to send back any signals will be the tough bit :P !

Anyway, good luck to them - and I hope the testing goes well :) .

RE: NASA tests underwater rover to find life - Moonshroom - 12-01-2019

Finding anything just chilling down there would be the single most important discovery in history. I hope they can pull it off, for we are closer than ever.

RE: NASA tests underwater rover to find life - Lurkerish Allsorts - 12-01-2019

(12-01-2019, 06:57 PM)Dust Bowl Wrote: Finding anything just chilling down there would be the single most important discovery in history. I hope they can pull it off, for we are closer than ever.

If it was multi cellular/complex life, yes. If its just a bunch of single cell organisms, we have evidence since at lease the 90s that Mars had them, and we know they are out there some where, while still important (especially if we want to step foot on Mars) it wouldn't be the most important discovery in history.