CB01

A spacecraft lands on Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, in temperatures of minus 260 degrees and searing radiation. Its mission: to penetrate the surface and send a probe into a watery realm beneath the ice. Meet Bill Stone, a preeminent underwater cave explorer and inventor who is developing robots to carry out that mission one day. Now, he and his team hope to test an autonomous underwater vehicle called Endurance in Antarctica’s icy waters. As we watch Endurance plunge into the depths, CGI animation helps us envision how its descendant would fare on a real mission to Europa. We see it hurtle across the solar system, finally dropping slowly into Europa’s liquid realm, where we follow it through its routines. Getting a robot through the ice and into the oceans of Europa will be an order of magnitude more difficult than anything Stone’s team has done so far.