Abstract
In the search for life, one of NASA’s priorities is in-situ exploration of ocean worlds in the solar system where there might be life under the ice shell. This requires the ocean below the ice shell to be reached by traversing through great ice depths that are extremely cold. Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, is one such challenging planetary body; its ice shell is estimated to be 40 km deep. An approach has been conceived to reach the ocean using a Cryobot, which is a melting probe with a lander as the platform for its deployment. This ice-penetrating vehicle concept consists of a cylindrical, narrow-bodied probe that encases a radioisotope heat/power source to melt through the icy shell. The probe would include a suite of scientific instruments to analyze both the ice during descent and the ocean water underneath. For communication, a set of fiber optic wire and wireless radio frequency (RF) in the very cold porous top layer is assumed, and then acoustic modules are used for communication in the warmer denser ice over a distance of 25 km between modules. In addition to the acoustic communication modules, a sonar is used to avoid obstacles and determine the distance from the ice‒water interface region. The focus of this chapter is the use of elastic waves for wireless communication and sonar for operation through great ice depths.
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Acknowledgements
Research reported in this abstract was conducted at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology, under a contract with National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA). This chapter also presents the latest results from an ongoing JPL formulation and technology development effort for the Europan melt probe “PRIME—Probe using Radioisotopes for Icy Moons Exploration”, which was funded by an internal award. The authors would like to thank the PRIME team members who contributed to the conception of the Cryobot configuration that is reported in this chapter. They include Scott H. Bryant, Jean-Pierre Fleurial, Jeremiah B. Gayle, Terry J. Hendricks, Samuel M. Howell, Emily F. Klonicki, Juergen Mueller, Knut I. Oxnevad, Adarsh Rajguru, Miles Smith and David F. Woerner, Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of technology.
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Bar-Cohen, Y. et al. (2023). Communication and Obstacles Detection Using Piezoelectric Transducers in a Penetrator Melting Deep Ice on Ocean Worlds. In: Badescu, V., Zacny, K., Bar-Cohen, Y. (eds) Handbook of Space Resources. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97913-3_28
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