EELS at Athabasca Glacier

A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is creating and testing a snake-like robot called EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor). Inspired by a desire to descend vents on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and enter the subsurface ocean, this versatile snake robot is being developed by JPL to autonomously map, traverse, and explore previously inaccessible destinations on Earth, the Moon, and other worlds in the solar system.

In its current form, the EELS 1.0 robot weighs about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and is 13 feet (4 meters) long. The field test at Athabasca Glacier in 2022 included only the robot’s sensor head. In 2023, the field test at that location included: EELS 1.0; EELS 1.5, a version of the robot designed to test autonomy software below the surface of the glacier; a lidar instrument that employs lasers to map ice features in 3D; and an instrument prototype that uses a liquid-analysis technique – called capillary electrophoresis – to look for the ingredients necessary for life.

EELS is funded by the Office of Technology Infusion and Strategy at JPL in Southern California through a technology accelerator program called JPL Next. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California. The EELS team has worked with a number of university partners on the project, including Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of California, San Diego.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech