If humans ever do establish a presence on Europa, it will surely be somewhere under the ice. Assuming, that is, that the ice isn't too thick, and to learn about that we have to await further study, and probably a Galilean moon orbiter of some kind that can observe Europa up close and for lengthy periods. But assuming the ice is more than a few meters thick, it should provide radiation screening, and getting down into that presumed Europan ocean is where we want to be in the search for life. Of course, the first undersea explorations on the Jovian moon will have to be robotic, and here we can talk about technologies under development today. NASA has funded a self-contained robot submarine called the Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) that operates with an unusual degree of autonomy, navigating with an array of 56 sonar sensors and an inertial guidance system. Now a series of tests in Mexico at a geothermal sinkhole, or cenote, called La Pilita have tested out key components,...

Speaking at the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF 2007) in Albuquerque yesterday, space historian Roger Launius questioned whether the idea of a human future in interstellar space is still relevant. From a USA Today story: "We may already be Cyborgs," Launius pointed out, looking out into an audience filled with people wearing glasses, hearing aids and sporting hip and knee replacements—not to mention those clinging to their handheld mobile phones and other communication devices. Projecting hundreds of years into the future, Launius said he believed that it is likely humans will evolve in ways that cannot be fathomed today, into a form of species perhaps tagged Homo sapiens Astro. "Will our movement to places like the Moon and Mars hasten this evolutionary process? … I don't know the answer," he said. Neither does any of us. You can read the whole thing here.

When Project Daedalus was being designed back in the 1970s, the members of the British Interplanetary Society who were working on the starship envisioned it being maintained by 'wardens,' robots that would keep crucial systems functional over the 50-year mission to Barnard's Star. Invariably, that calls up images of metallic machines, stiff in construction and marked by a certain ponderous clumsiness. True or false, it's a view of robotics that has persisted until relatively recently. But if you're going to do long-term maintenance on a starship, you'd better be more flexible. And that makes a Tufts initiative interesting not just from a space perspective but for applications in medicine, electronics, manufacturing and more. The Biomimetic Technologies for Soft-bodied Robots project aims to produce machines that draw on the model of living cells and tissues. Five Tufts departments will work with a $730,000 grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to get the job started. Check out what's...

Shrinking our instrumentation is one of the great hopes for extending spacecraft missions into the Kuiper Belt and beyond. No matter what kind of propulsion system we're talking about, lower payload weight gets us more bang for the buck. That's why a new imaging system out of Rochester Institute of Technology catches my eye this morning. It will capture images better than anything we can fly today, working at wavelengths from ultraviolet to mid-infrared. It also uses a good deal less power, but here's the real kicker: The new system shrinks the required hardware on a planetary mission from the size of a crate down to a chip no bigger than your thumb. The creation of Zeljko Ignjatovic and team (University of Rochester), the detector uses an analog-to-digital converter at each pixel. "Previous attempts to do this on-pixel conversion have required far too many transistors, leaving too little area to collect light," said Ignjatovic. "First tests on the chip show that it uses 50 times...

Igor Aleksander (University College, London) is a specialist in neural systems engineering who is working on emerging consciousness in machines, a process he calls 'more basic' than artificial intelligence. Velcro City Tourist Board offers up an interview with Aleksander that gets into models of the mind and the meaning of consciousness itself. A snippet: "There's one important principle involved in the computational modelling of consciousness: being conscious does not mean being a living human, or even a non-human animal. For an organism to be conscious is for it to be able to build representations of itself in a world that it perceives as being 'out there', with itself at the centre of it. It is to be able to represent the past as a history of experience, to attend to those things that are important to it, to plan and to evaluate plans - these are the five axioms." For more on conscious machines and links to Aleksander's axioms, read the whole story. We'll see the benefits of such...

We don't talk as much as we might about computer autonomy here, perhaps because it's obvious that the biggest challenge facing interstellar flight is propulsion. But it's clear that we need computer systems with fully autonomous characteristics on the kind of decades-long robotic missions that might eventually be flown. We'll want such probes to have human-like traits of curiosity and judgment, as well as repair and maintenace capabilities for the long journey. It's interesting to see, then, that Cambridge, MA-based BBN Technologies, which played such a pivotal role in the development of the ARPANET and later Internet protocols, has just received funding to create a so-called 'Integrated Learner.' Working to the tune of $5.5 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (with a possible total of $24 million over four years), BBN's first phase effort will be to create a reasoning system that can apply itself to advanced tasks and master principles of the kind we all refer...

Self-repair in spacecraft has always been a fascinating subject, one that comes to the fore as we launch missions to the outer Solar System. It's one thing to send commands to fix a stuck tape recorder, as was done with Galileo on the approach to Jupiter in 1995. In that situation, controllers worked with a 40-minute time lag -- eighty minutes for each confirmation that a command had been executed. But what happens if something goes awry in the Kuiper Belt, or the Oort Cloud, or a third of the way to Alpha Centauri? Clearly, probes beyond our Solar System will have to rely heavily on advances in robotics and autonomous computing that allow them to diagnose and fix their own problems. But they'll also have to make use of self-healing materials that can repair damage caused by temperature variations and external collisions. Small cracks caused by micrometeorites, for example, could weaken the spacecraft as they accumulate over the course of a long mission. But how about healing such...

As we saw in yesterday's post on microbots, one of the problems of robotic exploration is that we put our equipment into relatively smooth terrain. That makes sense, given the time and cost of getting rovers to Mars, for example; what a shame it would be to see a priceless instrument package slam into a mountainside as it touches down. But rugged terrains, those places where water and volcanic activity have changed a landscape, may tell us much about a planet's history and the possible existence of life on it. Now a team of scientists is proposing a fundamental change to our existing paradigm of robotic exploration. In addition to orbiters, the team (scientists from the California Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona, and the U.S. Geological Survey) has focused on airborne instrument packages (think 'blimps'), complemented by the kind of small, robotic explorers that could work their way into even the most hostile landscapes. "We're not trying to take anything away from...

One way to explore a planetary surface is by rover, much as we are doing now on Mars with Spirit and Opportunity. The amount of data we've received from these missions has been nothing short of sensational, but as we look to the future, a key problem looms: rovers can sample only small areas of the surface. They're a precious commodity that has to be targeted to high-value destinations, meaning they're not adaptable to broad, general surveys. But a new robotic approach may come to the rescue, and it's one that has just received Phase II funding from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts. Under the supervision of principal investigator Steven Dubowsky (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), the work focuses on 'microbots' to enable large-scale explorations. Microbots are spherical robots that could be dropped by the thousands, perhaps through air-bags deployed from orbiter spacecraft. They would be able to hop, bounce and roll their way to sites in the most rugged terrain, equipped...

New technologies, rarely foreseen by 'futurists,' often change everything. Just as science fiction could not predict the PC, so visionaries like Arthur C. Clarke could not predict the developments in electronics that would make his idea of geostationary relay satellites practicable. Yes, Clarke dreamed up the idea of such satellites, but he was talking about manned space stations handling the abundant telecommunications traffic that was to come. In a mere 15 years, it would become possible for radio technology to bring Clarke's ideas to fruition, just as Earth observation, astronomy and military reconaissance would be performed by unmanned satellites. Now we speculate about proposed manned expeditions to Mars, but is the future human or robotic as we push into the outer Solar System? Bob Parkinson tackles the subject in an essay in the March/April issue of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Consider the march of machinery in the years since the first manned...

Even in best-case scenarios, a probe to Alpha Centauri or other nearby stars will take decades to reach its target, perhaps centuries. That puts the premium on spacecraft autonomy, an interesting take on which is the ability of machinery to repair itself. Cornell researchers have just announced a milestone in this regard, the creation of a robot that makes copies of itself. Previous self-replicating designs have existed only as computer simulations or were much simpler than Cornell's new devices. As reported in the May 12 issue of Nature, the university's Hod Lipson and colleagues have created machines made up of modular cubes called 'molecubes.' Each is identical and contains the computer program that allows it to reproduce. Using electromagnets on their faces, the cubes can adhere to one another selectively; a complete robot is made up of an assembly of such molecubes. And because the cubes are divided, robots composed of them can bend to various angles or manipulate other cubes....

An intelligent computer that can operate autonomously is the heart of any interstellar robotic probe. In an important sense, it would be the probe, running its systems, adjusting its course, repairing damage, conducting experiments and choosing the future direction of its own research. We're a long way from such autonomy, but a new company called Numenta may be laying some of the groundwork. The firm plans to use the theories of Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot and co-founder of Palm Computing and Handspring, to create hardware that can think and learn like a human brain. Hawkins' theories appeared in his recent book On Intelligence, and surfaced again at the PC Forum conference in Scottsdale AZ, where he explained his plans in some detail, as discussed in a recent story by Erick Schonfeld in Business 2.0. Hawkins believes the brain's basic function is to store patterns, creating a model of the world that is constantly being used as a reference that can predict what will...

As we await the Titan descent, Cassini and Huygens have all the headlines, but Centauri Dreams is remembering a much earlier mission. The Mariner 2 Venus probe was the first successful interplanetary spacecraft. In its pre-autonomous days, spacecraft could be crippled without communications from controllers monitoring their progress. Launched in August of 1962, the probe was a rare early success for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory after a string of lunar failures (the Ranger series), but as it headed for Venus, controllers realized that Mariner 2 would miss its target by over 200,000 miles. The needed mid-course correction was made by encoding computer commands on tape, feeding them to the Deep Space Network's antennae at Goldstone, and transmitting them to Mariner 2, which in turn fed them into its own command sequencer and, over a million and a half miles from Earth, fired its thrusters for almost four hours to adjust its trajectory. The mission was a success, but only because the...

One of the fascinations of nanotechnology is its ability to shrink payloads. That means a lot when every kilogram you add to a probe makes it that much more costly to propel; at interstellar distances, nanotechnology means we might one day send tiny probes at a fraction of the vast cost of comparative giants like today's Cassini Saturn orbiter. One project that might deploy such methods in the near future is ANTS -- Autonomous Nano Technology Swarm. The acronym is apt, because ANTS is all about collective, emergent intelligence of the sort that appears in insect colonies. What scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center envision is a massive cluster of tiny probes that use artificial intelligence to explore the asteroid belt. Each probe, weighing perhaps 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) would have its role -- while a small number of them direct the exploration, perhaps 900 of the probes would proceed to do the work, with only a few returning to Earth with data. One key factor here is...