The best way to explore Europa's oceans is to send a whole swarm of small swimming robots, deployed under the ice by a tunneling cryobot.
Jupiter’s moon Europa is the most compelling target in the search for life in our Solar System. Europa is covered in an ice shell between 15 to 25 kilometres thick. Under the ice is an ocean between 75 and 85 kilometres thick.
The cryobot would be connected to the lander via a communications tether, and the stationary surface lander would be the communication point for Earth-based mission controllers. But the smaller SWIM-bots would be independent. The group of independent SWIM-bots would solve another problem associated with exploring ice-covered ocean worlds. The only feasible way to get through Europa’s 15 to 25 km ice shell is with heat. The cryobot would tunnel its way through all that ice with a hot nuclear power source. Due to design and mission constraints, the cryobot would likely not travel beyond the point where it breached the bottom of the ice and reached the ocean.
Schaler says that the individual bots could also act together in a swarm if desired, much like flocks of fish do. This maneuver could play a critical role in the search for life by identifying gradients in energy or salinity. Energy gradients are deemed critical to life’s development because life basically feeds off of them. Life exploits energy gradients to make better and better copies of itself that spread through the environment, looking for other energy gradients to exploit.
Europa only has an ocean because of its proximity to Jupiter. As the moon orbits the gas planet, tidal flexing heats Europa enough to keep water in its liquid state. But that proximity and tidal flexing come at a cost: Jupiter emits powerful radiation. So powerful, in fact, that NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter keeps its sensitive instruments inside a titanium vault for protection. It also follows a polar orbit which helps it avoid the worst of the radiation.
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