A new Europa Lander prototype was just successfully field tested on Alaska‘s Matanuska Glacier to simulate the icy conditions of Jupiter’s moon, demonstrating the system’s capabilities for an autonomous sample collection mission.
Beneath its icy exterior, scientists suspect that Europa may harbor at least the building blocks of life in a potentially habitable subsurface ocean. The Europa Clipper mission is scheduled to arrive at the moon in April 2030, but will only fly by to collect data from far above the moon’s surface.
Prototyping the Europa Mission
Since 2020, NASA has been studying potential Europa Lander mission concepts. Now, a team of scientists has produced a prototype robotic system for exploring Jupiter’s moon. Their design integrates autonomous control software with drilling hardware to crack that icy surface in search of the first potentially life-containing samples. Such a lander vehicle will need to be extremely robust to withstand not just the rigors of space travel but also the harsh Europan conditions.
Additionally, the moon’s extreme distance from the sun means that such a mission will not be able to rely on solar power, as many Mars landers have. The vehicle will require an extremely efficient power system to stay operable for an appreciable period of time. Likewise, the distance from Earth will create communications challenges, necessitating autonomous operation.
In its current form, the lander is built around an aluminum frame supporting a head, two arms, and four legs. The head contains stereo cameras for capturing visual information. The arms feature variable degrees of freedom and can attach multiple tools designed to drill, excavate, and scoop.
Testing for an IcY Landing
The research team performed their Alaskan field tests in July 2022. These tests focused not just on single instruments but also on how the entire integrated system performed in a real-world environment.
“An important note is that the Europa Lander is a concept of a mission; it has not been funded by NASA to proceed as a mission,” lead author Joseph Bowkett told The Debrief. “All of our work was research-oriented. But the lander mockup had significantly more autonomy than is typically employed on existing Mars rovers and landers, in large part due to the limited concept mission timeline, expected need to use batteries, and high power required to communicate with Earth.”
In addition to the field tests, the team performed a series of laboratory trials with their prototype. Across all testing, the device successfully collected samples from multiple sites with changing slopes, ice depths, and gravel dispersal.
Mission Comparison
“Much of the autonomous sampling behaviors developed under the Europa Lander research effort may be able to transfer to other icy moons such as Enceladus, though the exact conditions on the surface may be different,” Bowkett commented. “One feature of the Europa Lander Sampling Autonomy effort was that it needed to be robust to a wide variety of environmental scenarios, due to the limited knowledge of Europa’s surface. That should make the lessons from the effort transferable to other icy moon environments.”
Bowkett also worked on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) project, an autonomous snake-like robot designed to hunt for life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. JPL developed the EELS form with the intention that the robot not just slither across the surface but seek out plume vents, tunnel its way directly into the subsurface liquid water ocean hypothesized to exist under the ice, and take direct measurements in search of life.
“A lander mission, such as the Europa concept, is not quite as large a technical leap as the idea of traversing down a complex subterranean environment over a long distance,” Bowett explained. “And it would be able to collect surface hints of any life below the surface (biosignatures in ice), rather than observing the assumed ocean directly.”
“As humans explore further out into the solar system, the environments will get more challenging and the communication with Earth more difficult, meaning the decisions that need to be made by the spacecraft itself will get more complex,” Bowkett concluded. “While recent advances in AI have made their way into daily life quickly, being confident that a highly autonomous spacecraft will always do the right thing is a challenging thing to prove, and require focused effort from the aerospace industry.”
The paper “Autonomous Surface Sampling for the Europa Lander Mission Concept” appeared on May 21, 2025, in Science Robotics.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.