The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is developing swimming robots that can swim through the water beneath the thick ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, searching for alien life.
According to NewsBytes, SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro Swimmers) has been proposed by Ethan Schaler, a robotics mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Schaler’s SWIM concept was recently awarded $600,000 in phase two funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC). Over the next two years, Schaler and his team will use the funding to make and test 3D printed prototypes.
SWIM’s early-stage concept envisions wedge-shaped robots, each about 12 centimetres long and 60 to 75 cubic centimetres in volume. They are designed so that about four dozen of them could fit in a robot (ice-penetrating probe) 25 centimetres in diameter, taking up just 15 per cent of the science payload volume.
