Geology professor Peter Doran is leading a group of scientists in conjunction with NASA and Stone Aerospace to develop a specialized cryobot for potential space exploration.
The goal is for the cryobot, named SPINDLE, to reach an unexplored subglacial lake in Antarctica as a precursor to exploring icy moons, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa, Doran said.
A $3 million grant from NASA is funding Phase A of the project, which is bringing together experts from universities across the country and engineers from Stone Aerospace to develop the cryobot’s design. The team held the first of its three meetings March 7-9 at the University.
Bill Stone, the founder of Stone Aerospace, said the purpose of Phase A is to define the parameters for the cryobot’s design, including energy sources, dimensions and the necessary scientific instruments for measuring the environment and detecting potential life forms.
The SPINDLE cryobot is a robotic device which can melt through the ice and deliver a HAUV, or hybrid autonomous underwater vehicle, to the subglacial body of water to explore and collect samples.
Stone said SPINDLE is the culmination of scientific collaborations between himself and Doran over the past 10 years.
“That was like the preamble, and what we proposed to NASA last year was taking everything that we had learned and putting it into basically a dress rehearsal for any of the outer planet ocean worlds,” Stone said.
Tentative designs for the cryobot proposed the robot be 0.3 meters in diameter and seven to 10 meters in length, including the main body of the cryobot, the payload bay and the HAUV. While the general design isn’t complicated, both Stone and Doran agree safely powering the cryobot is a challenge.
Melting through ice on moons could require as much as 50 kilowatts to one megawatt of energy, which would be enough energy to power a small village, Stone said. Because of environmental regulations, the team is considering using a high-powered laser to power the cryobot.
Stone Aerospace has powered previous cryobot missions requiring high-powered lasers by delivering the energy to the cryobot over a fiber optic line. Doran said using a laser for this mission is slightly radical.
Typical industrial lasers use a kilowatt of energy, and the cryobot’s design calls for nearly 100 to 125 kilowatts to melt through the ice. With a laser of that magnitude, you could cut a car in two from half a mile away, Stone said. If successful, the project’s laser will be the largest continuous waved laser ever built.
In addition to concerns about safely powering the cryobot, the project’s field logistics are also complicated, Doran said. Unlike in space, the time frame for working in Antarctica is narrow. Stone said executing the mission and collecting data could take as long as six to eight weeks, not including the time necessary to establish base camp, bring in equipment and account for weather.
Despite these challenges, Doran and Stone are ready to move forward.
“There’s really no deal breakers in this,” Doran said. “We’ve done a lot of it before, and it’s just a matter of scaling it up to depths we’ve never gone to before.”
The $3 million NASA grant only funds Phase A of the program, and the team is hoping it can quickly secure funding for Phase B, when team members will begin assembling and testing the cryobot in the field. If the cryobot passes initial tests, the team will bring it to Antarctica for its final test.
If the project is successful and NASA and the U.S. government are willing to fund the project, Stone said a cryobot could be operating on Europa or another celestial body by 2032.