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Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor on Wikipedia
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Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) Robotic Architecture
Jul 18, 2019
kiss.caltech.edu/lectures/2019_EELS.htmlQuote:
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.
"JPL’s Snake-Like EELS Slithers Into New Robotics Terrain"
May 8, 2023
Article "NASA hopes its snake robot can search for alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus"
EELS could one day wriggle its way into Enceladus' hidden oceans in search of extraterrestrial life.
by Andrew Paul
May 8, 2023
https://youtu.be/ifCIDT4X9AM
Testing out JPL’s new snake robot
May 9, 2023
Quote:
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 robot is being developed to autonomously map, traverse, and explore previously inaccessible destinations on Earth, the Moon, and other worlds in our solar system.
The robot has been put to the test in sandy, snowy, and icy environments, including the Mars-like terrain at JPL’s Mars Yard, a “robot playground” created at a ski resort in the snowy mountains of Southern California, and even an indoor ice rink.
Because of the long communications lag time between Earth and deep space, EELS is designed to autonomously sense its environment, calculate risk, travel, and gather data with yet-to-be-determined science instruments. When something goes wrong, the goal is for the robot to recover on its own, without human assistance.
The project team began building the first prototype in 2019, and has been making continual revisions. They’ve been trying out white, 3D-printed plastic screws for testing on looser terrain like sand and soft snow, as well as sharper, black metal screws for ice. In its current form, the EELS 1.0 robot weighs about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and is 13 feet (4 meters) long.
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. The robot is not currently part of any NASA mission.
https://youtu.be/V5weg-xzedI?si=K1R0Vr_9dCOizOrD
Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) - First Surface Mobility Test on Ice (July 2022)
Jan 6, 2024
Article "NASA’s snake robot is designed to search out life in the icy oceans of a Saturn moon"
by Brian Heater
March 26, 2024