Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) Robotic Architecture

Watch Kalind Carpenter and Morgan Cable from JPL present the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor or EELS robot architecture which is designed to carry the latest instruments into dynamic arenas in search of life. EELS is adaptable to traverse ocean world inspired terrain, fluidized media, enclosed labyrinthian environments and liquids. It is a snake-like self-propelled endoscope form comprising serially-replicated segments with encapsulated locomotion and bending. This lecture was presented at the Keck Institute for Space Studies on July 15, 2019.

Speakers' Biography:

Kalind Carpenter is a Robotics Engineer in the robotic Vehicles and Manipulators group at JPL. The lab he has helped create focuses on rapid technology development and end effectors specifically tailored to gripping and extreme surface mobility. He is the principal investigator (PI) of the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), a snakelike robot aimed to access Enceladus’s ocean through an active plume. He has collaborated on four patents including two based on his thesis research and has three more provisional patents in place.

Dr. Morgan Cable is a Research Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She worked on the Cassini Mission as a Project Science Systems Engineer, and is currently a member of the Project Science Team for the Europa Lander mission concept. Morgan’s research focuses on organic and biomarker detection, through both in situ and remote sensing techniques. While earning her Ph.D. in Chemistry at Caltech, she designed receptor sites for the detection of bacterial spores, the toughest form of life. As a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at JPL, Morgan developed novel protocols to analyze organic molecules such as amines and fatty acids using small, portable microfluidic sensors. Currently Dr. Cable performs laboratory experiments to study the unique organic chemistry of Titan, a moon of Saturn. She and colleagues were the first to discover a co-crystal, the equivalent of a ‘hydrated mineral’, made exclusively of organics that may exist on Titan’s surface. This work has led to the inception of a new field, Titan ‘petrology’. Morgan also conducts field work in extreme environments on Earth, searching for life in places such as the Atacama Desert, the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro and the lava fields in Iceland.

[protenuator]

I sampled some audio today. I saw a post about the arctic EELS testing beginning... Best in success! -Faulted Geologist

[peachtrees]

One question: if we are going to wait 12 years to get this robot to Enceladus, shouldn't we at least send two in case one fails? How about 10 just to make sure one makes it, lands successfully, etc. Launch costs have plummeted, miniaturization has made robotics cheaper/lighter. What we can't control is time.