Ice moons such as Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus are currently at the forefront of the search for extraterrestrial life, as it is believed that beneath their thick icy shells there are vast internal oceans that could potentially support life.
In October, NASA launched the Europa Clipper probe to learn more about the conditions on Europa, and now there are several R&D efforts underway to directly explore the interior oceans of these icy moons.
One such project, called SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers), is being led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The program plans to send a number of palm-sized autonomous underwater robots into the ice moons’ internal oceans to