NANA has unveiled a plan to unleash swarms of cellphone-sized robots to hunt for alien life on other planets.
The US space agency developed the Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) concept for exploration of inhospitable planets and celestial bodies, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa or Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
The robots would be packed into an ice-melting probe that sinks through the miles-thick icy shell of planets, before a mechanism releases them underwater to take measurements of the previously-impossible to reach oceans.
Nasa’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program awarded a $600,000 grant to Ethan Schaler, a robotics mechanical engineer at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to study feasibility and design options, with the hope of building a 3D-printed prototype within the next two years.
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