NASA tests robotic tools to crack the surface of icy moons

Techcrunch -------- While the Mars rovers are assiduously searching the red planet for water over the next decade, there are whole moons full of the stuff just waiting for us to come visit. At least, that’s the theory. But missions to Europa and Titan are still hypothetical, so in the meantime NASA is toying with ideas about how a robotic lander would get through the miles of ice that lie on top of these extraterrestrial oceans. From their limited observations of Europa, scientists estimate that the ice is somewhere between 6 and 12 miles thick. We’ve never had to drill through anything like that using an autonomous system, let alone one that’s being bathed in radiation from Jupiter. That’s what the Ocean Worlds Mobility and Sensing project looked into. To learn more click on the picture below to read the article.