After the probes will be the robots.

If we had the opportunity to send an exploration robot to Saturn's moon Enceladus, what characteristics would it have; those equipped with wheels work well on flat terrain, but could not advance in cracked and slippery areas due to ice.

The proposal of a team from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is creating and testing a snake-shaped robot, called EELS, an acronym for exobiology surveyor of existing life, because its main objective, as you can imagine, is to search for life that has arisen in the ocean of the moon enceladus.

This versatile robot is being developed with capabilities to autonomously map, traverse and explore inaccessible destinations, not just on Enceladus, it could also be used here on earth, for example in the lakes under the ice of Antarctica or in the caves of the Moon and the polar caps of Mars or other worlds in our solar system with difficult terrain.

The robot has already been put to the test in sandy, snowy and icy environments. It has even been tested on terrain similar to what we would find on Mars, terrain created at a ski resort in the snowy mountains of Southern California.

The mission in Enceladus will not be easy, it will be very complicated, among other things due to the long delay in communications between Earth and Saturn, on average a message from the robot would take almost an hour and a quarter to arrive from the Planet of the Rings to our planet and it would take another hour and a quarter for the robot to receive a response from the mission team on the ground.

For this reason, the robot snake is designed with artificial intelligence capable of autonomously detecting its environment, calculating risks, traveling and collecting data with scientific instruments. If something goes wrong, the robot will have to make a decision and it will be he the one who will have to overcome the problem alone without human help.

The project team started building the first prototype in 2019 and has been making continuous revisions, the robot body is threaded with rotating drill-like screws that can propel the snake, the expert team has been testing various materials to In order to face instinctive challenges, for example, they have tested 3D-printed white plastic rotating screws that are very useful for advancing on loose terrain such as sand or soft snow, terrain that we could find on Mars.

They have also tried rotating metal screws, sharper in order to be able to dig in and advance on land made up of slippery ice. In its current form, the robot snake weighs about 100 kg and measures about 4 meters.

The team aims to finalize the concept adjustments for the robot snake or EELS by the fall of 2024 after which they hope to propose a mission to Enceladus to NASA, if the development ultimately goes well, the robot snake would be sent on a trip to the Saturn system that would last about 12 years, when it arrived in cellar it would land near a crack or vent the snake would crawl to it and descend through the crack, until if there is luck to reach the surface ocean.

Even if it did not arrive, which would be extremely difficult, because we are talking about cracks that are several kilometers thick and whose contact with the bottom water can open or close explosively, well, yes, you could go on analyzing the remains that you find in your I walk through the crack, communicating to the earth everything it finds there and if it finally discovers the presence of life, we could have it in just over an hour and a quarter.

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