00:00One environment on Earth that might serve as a useful analog for the exploration of Europa's ocean,
00:10which is trapped beneath a pretty thick ice shell, is the Arctic.
00:14And so our team developed this under-ice rover to study these methane-rich lakes up along the Alaskan permafrost.
00:21Here, we're just taking an expedition out to a northern Arctic lake up near the northernmost point in Alaska.
00:32So we're driving on snow machines out to take our robot underneath the ice.
00:38Sub-zero temperatures, Arctic ice, fighting winds, polar bears, and robots.
00:45God, I love this job.
00:46The early testing, we did tethered, which is our lifeline back to the surface.
00:55We didn't know whether this thing was going to sink or float, whether the systems were going to work.
00:59And so we're checking out the wheels, the cameras, the lights, just making sure everything works before we go wireless.
01:05And if we do eventually deploy in a world like Europa, we're not going to have a tethered.
01:10We're going to need to be able to do remote operations untethered.
01:16Now, we specifically go out there during times when the ice is thin to find out where these methane seeps are.
01:24I'm actually poking at the ice, trying to find a trail for us that is safe for us to deploy the rover on.
01:30It's dangerous business walking around on this thin ice.
01:32I mean, this is why we thought of the rover to begin with.
01:35We thought, oh, well, just invert the surface.
01:38Instead of a rover that drives on the ground, we'll have a rover that drives on the ceiling.
01:41And what do we need to do to do that? We just make it buoyant so it floats and essentially dries on the ceiling, which is the ice surface.
01:49Here's a good shot of a methane seat where it's actually bubbling up from the lake floor and keeping the ice from freezing right there.
01:55And the two different side lobes of the rover can be controlled independently.
02:02And so the cameras can look down at the lake bed and map out where some of the methane seeps are forming.
02:09And they can also be turned up to look at those methane bubbles and study what's actually happening at the ice-water interface.
02:16And so the rover just drives right along upside down using buoyancy instead of weight and gets up close and personal to be able to image and also sample these methane bubbles.
02:27The later testing we've done, untethered, so the rover is communicating through the ice back to a base station.
02:32And then from that base station up to satellites, back to operators at JPL or really anywhere in the world.
02:38This is about the closest you can get to Europa-like operations on Earth.
02:41Our research up in the Arctic has this win-win where by studying the methane that's trapped in these lakes and coming out of the permafrost,
02:51we're helping to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions that are affecting climate change.
02:57While simultaneously building a vehicle and a scientific platform that serves as a precursor for something that may someday fly to Europa or Enceladus or one of the other moons that harbors an ocean.
03:11And so the
03:33The
