Wild 'Tunnelbot' Designs Could Crack Secrets of Icy Jupiter Moon Europa

[Judi Lynn]

By Meghan Bartels, Space.com Senior Writer | December 21, 2018 07:26am ET

The icy shell encasing Jupiter's moon Europa is both a promise and a problem: It increases the plausibility of life floating through the ocean that scientists think hides below it by blocking damaging radiation, but it also blocks scientists from getting a good look at what's going on under the ice.

That's why scientists have begun to dream up specialized probes that would carry instruments below the ice. Andrew Dombard, a geophysicist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is one of those scientists, and he presented two possible designs for a "tunnelbot" at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union last week.

"Every time you propose a new, kind of zany idea, people are like, 'Really, can you make this work?'" Dombard said. "We think we can." [Photos: Europa, Mysterious Icy Moon of Jupiter]

The team premised their work on the assumption that by the time the tunnelbot was ready for its journey, they could bring some sort of station to set up on Europa's surface that could survive for the three years or so the tunnelbot would take to burrow through the icy shell. That's a big requirement: NASA's next planned mission to the moon will only orbit Europa, and even if the much-discussed Europa Lander mission concept becomes a reality, the lander would last just three weeks.

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