Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have built a robot that will be able to chart the icy waters found in outer space, such as on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
The Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration (BRUIE) is operated through satellite link and designed to cling onto the underside of ice with metal tires, transmitting measurements back to scientists and assessing whether the waters host other life-forms.
BRUIE is currently being tested in frozen Alaska lakes, but engineers hope that the robot will one day be flown to Europa.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY5WQG3-3mo]
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