Europa and other ocean worlds in our solar system have recently attracted much attention. They are thought to be some of the most likely places in our solar system for life to have developed off Earth, given the presence of liquid water under their ice sheathes and our understanding of liquid water as one of the necessities for the development of life.
Various missions are planned to these ocean worlds, but many suffer from numerous design constraints. Requirements to break through kilometers of ice on a world far from the sun will do that to any. These design constraints sometimes make it difficult for the missions to achieve one of their most important functions—the search for life.
But what happens once the drilling bot gets there? Ideally, the robot itself would explore its immediate surroundings. However, there is a good chance that drilling through the ice crust will limit the usefulness of any data collected nearby. The bot itself could go for a dip, but therequired to drill through all that ice would likely create a"hot bubble" around the robot, diminishing the usefulness of any science its sensors attempt to do.
Water is notoriously difficult to transfer electric signals through. Hence, the JPL engineers suggested using an ultrasonic communication system to send data from the mothership to the microbots and vice versa. Potentially, the SESAME mothership could also power the microbots using an underwater power transfer technique, though there are a lot of ways that can go wrong.
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