Just a few weeks ago, an orange egg was lowered through fourteen inches of ice covering Lake Mendota, here in frozen Wisconsin.

The egg is an autonomous underwater rover, named Endurance (for Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic ANtarctiC Explorer). Endurance is designed to independently rove, map, and sample the Antarctic Lake Bonney, which is permanantly locked under ice in the McMurdo Dry Valley system. Future missions may take Endurance or a descendant further out in our solar system, to investigate under the ice of the Jovian moon, Europa.

Endurance is equipped with a CCD camera, sensors to measure conductivity, oxygen, light, salinity and temperature, and a Raman spectroscopy probe that can be used to sample the lake bottom sediments from several feet above the lake bottom. The goal is to create a complete 3d volume map of an ~1000 m square region of Lake Bonney, from the lake bed to the underside of the capping ice. The proposed resolution is to record values for every 10 m x 10 m x 1 m voxel. The entire data set will be georeferenced to the GPS-recorded location of the borehole, and the underwater terrain will be entirely captured in digital photos.

The mission in Lake Mendota was a shakedown cruise for Endurance, to field test the communications, navigation and propulsion systems under suitably icy conditions. First, Endurance was lowered into the water but kept tethered to the crane while the system cooled down and was tested. Then Endurance was released to run an entire simulated mission, including image capturing, mapping and environmental sensing. At the end, Endurance was recovered by the crane, and will now be prepared for shipping to the Antarctic and her upcoming mission under Lake Bonney (schedule not yet announced? I'm looking into this).

Endurance is a joint project of teams at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Montana State University and Stone Aerospace, and is partially funded by NASA.

Read More In: General Robotics