Icy moons are a class of natural satellites with surfaces composed mostly of ice. Most known large icy moons belong to giant planets, whose orbits lie beyond the Solar System's frost line. Scientists are eager to explore them, but how?
The new map of Antarctica ‘beneath the ice’ triggered my inspiration. An exploration robot below the ice. At the moment all celestial body explorers are optimized for surface exploration on a rocky terrain. There is no water or ice explorer robot for space. My proposition is to develop one on Earth first and use it to explore Antarctica before sending it to space.
Digging beneath the ice requires nuclear energy source. Solar panels and similar systems would not work. As tradition with most of my designs, I propose Pu-238 as the energy source. A spherical robot with two hemispherical digger wheels powered by the heat of Pu-238. Ice is an ideal heatsink. As a result, good heat conducting digger wheels would form the cold reservoir for the heat engine. I propose Helium as the pressurizing gas while it has a very low condensation temperature and it is inert. Ideally, the explorer robot should have slightly positive buoyancy in water. This is critical if the robot reaches sub surface ocean while digging beneath the ice. A negative buoyancy would sink it and end the mission.
The spherical robot would have sensor windows on its sides. These windows would allow the robot to conduct beneath the ice research. Due to limited penetration of radio waves underwater, the robot would operate mostly autonomous. As a result, the robot would execute missions that requires it to surface after a certain amount of time. Once surfaced, the data acquired from autonomous ice exploration would be uploaded to the control center and new mission data would be downloaded on to the robot.
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