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This Is the Rover That We Want to Send to Alien Oceans

Let’s chuck this thing at Europa, already.

Jupiter's moon Europa is widely considered to be the most likely candidate for alien life in our solar system, thanks to its massive subsurface ocean. Endowed with roughly three times as much water as Earth, this icy world has long been a tantalizing possible destination for an exploratory mission.

Fortunately, NASA is on the case. The agency recently announced its intentions to launch a probe to this promising moon during the 2020s, and a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team has already field-tested a prototype of the plucky explorer that will one day chart its extraterrestrial seas.

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The rover, provisionally known as the Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration (BRUIE), is the star of a new JPL video released Thursday.

BRUIE test in Alaska. Video:NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/YouTube

Normally, planetary rovers are designed to drive upright on the surface of their adopted homes, but BRUIE takes the opposite tack by driving underwater and upside-down. Instead of gravity keeping its wheels on the ground, buoyancy keeps the robot firmly on the underside of ice shelves.

"We thought, 'oh well, we'll just invert the surface,'" said astrobiologist and BRUIE team member Dan Berisfold. "Instead of having a rover that drives on the ground, we'll have a rover that drives on the ceiling […] which is the ice surface."

To test out the concept, Berisfold and the rest of the BRUIE team took the rover for a spin in the methane-rich Arctic waters outside of Barrow, Alaska. BRUIE performed very well, recording images and data about the methane bubbles forming under the thin crust of ice.

"Our research up in the Arctic has this win-win," said astrobiologist Kevin Hand. "By studying the methane that's trapped in these lakes and coming out of the permafrost, we're helping to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions that are affecting climate change, while simultaneously building a vehicle and a scientific platform that serves as a precursor for something that may some day fly to Europa or Enceladus or one of the other moons that harbors an ocean."

To that point, the last decade has revealed that Europa is far from the only world in our solar system that sports a subsurface sea. As Hand mentioned, Saturn's moon Enceladus has one, as does Europa's neighboring moons Callisto and Ganymede, and there are many other potential candidates. So while BRUIE has only ventured out into Earth's oceans at this point, its descendants may one day explore alien waters, and whatever may lurk within them.