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The Saturnian moon Enceladus with its extensive water bodies underneath a thick ice sheet cover is a potential candidate for extraterrestrial life. Direct exploration of such extraterrestrial aquatic ecosystems requires advanced access and sampling technologies with a high level of autonomy. A new technological approach has been developed as part of the collaborative research project Enceladus Explorer (EnEx). The concept is based upon a minimally invasive melting probe called the IceMole. The force-regulated, heater-controlled IceMole is able to travel along a curved trajectory as well as upwards. Hence, it allows maneuvers which may be necessary for obstacle avoidance or target selection. Maneuverability, however, necessitates a sophisticated on-board navigation system capable of autonomous operations. The development of such a navigational system has been the focal part of the EnEx project. The original IceMole has been further developed to include relative positioning based on in-ice attitude determination, acoustic positioning, ultrasonic obstacle and target detection integrated through a high-level sensor fusion. This paper describes the EnEx technology and discusses implications for an actual extraterrestrial mission concept.
There is significant interest in sampling subglacial environments for geobiological studies, but they are difficult to access. Existing ice-drilling technologies make it cumbersome to maintain microbiologically clean access for sample acquisition and environmental stewardship of potentially fragile subglacial aquatic ecosystems. The IceMole is a maneuverable subsurface ice probe for clean in situ analysis and sampling of glacial ice and subglacial materials. The design is based on the novel concept of combining melting and mechanical propulsion. It can change melting direction by differential heating of the melting head and optional side-wall heaters. The first two prototypes were successfully tested between 2010 and 2012 on glaciers in Switzerland and Iceland. They demonstrated downward, horizontal and upward melting, as well as curve driving and dirt layer penetration. A more advanced probe is currently under development as part of the Enceladus Explorer (EnEx) project. It offers systems for obstacle avoidance, target detection, and navigation in ice. For the EnEx-IceMole, we will pay particular attention to clean protocols for the sampling of subglacial materials for biogeochemical analysis. We plan to use this probe for clean access into a unique subglacial aquatic environment at Blood Falls, Antarctica, with return of a subglacial brine sample.
Subglacial environments on Earth offer important analogs to Ocean World targets in our solar system. These unique microbial ecosystems remain understudied due to the challenges of access through thick glacial ice (tens to hundreds of meters). Additionally, sub-ice collections must be conducted in a clean manner to ensure sample integrity for downstream microbiological and geochemical analyses. We describe the field-based cleaning of a melt probe that was used to collect brine samples from within a glacier conduit at Blood Falls, Antarctica, for geomicrobiological studies. We used a thermoelectric melting probe called the IceMole that was designed to be minimally invasive in that the logistical requirements in support of drilling operations were small and the probe could be cleaned, even in a remote field setting, so as to minimize potential contamination. In our study, the exterior bioburden on the IceMole was reduced to levels measured in most clean rooms, and below that of the ice surrounding our sampling target. Potential microbial contaminants were identified during the cleaning process; however, very few were detected in the final englacial sample collected with the IceMole and were present in extremely low abundances (∼0.063% of 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequences). This cleaning protocol can help minimize contamination when working in remote field locations, support microbiological sampling of terrestrial subglacial environments using melting probes, and help inform planetary protection challenges for Ocean World analog mission concepts.