\n<\/p>\n
Hiro Ono:<\/strong> There are many reasons that this is challenging, but I would say the greatest challenge is the uncertainty, the unknowns. We\u2019ve sent 10 spacecraft to Mars, knowing a lot beforehand about the regions where we landed and explored. But the best resolution we have on Enceladus is about 6 meters (20 feet) per pixel and only around very limited regions. We don\u2019t know, for example, what the surface topography is or what the geometry of the vents is. We still don\u2019t know how strong the jets are. It\u2019s really, really hard to design an explorer without knowing what the environment is.\u00a0<\/p>\n That\u2019s why EELS is so different from rovers, in that its snakelike design gives it many ways of moving around. If something unexpected happens, it can change the mode of locomotion and figure out the best way to interact with the environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n SAA:<\/strong> There are two things going on here. One is the actual physical design of this object, but there\u2019s also the brain behind this technology. EELS uses artificial intelligence to figure out how to move around its environment based on the conditions it encounters. Hiro, you\u2019ve spoken before about the idea of \u201cSpace Exploration 3.0.\u201d Can you talk a little bit about this framework for understanding space exploration and how this technology represents a new phase forward?<\/p>\n HO:<\/strong> The way we explore planetary surfaces has changed over time. In the \u201960s, NASA sent a bunch of spacecraft to the Moon as a precursor to Apollo. It was basically trial and error to learn what worked. And that was a reasonable way to learn how to get to the Moon because the Moon is nearby. You can get there in three days. So we could call that \u201cRobotic Space Exploration 1.0\u201d: trial and error.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mars is six to seven months away, and the launch window opens up only every 26 months. Now you cannot do trial and error and wish for the best, right? You need to be sure that what you\u2019re going to do will work, so we changed the mode.<\/p>\n We got more cautious; we incrementally learned about the environment and refined our capabilities, starting with flybys, orbiters, landers, and then rovers. Then, we knew enough to build Curiosity and Perseverance \u2014 super complex robots \u2014 and now we are designing an even more complex Mars Sample Return campaign. That\u2019s \u201cRobotic Space Exploration 2.0.\u201d And that\u2019s how we were so successful on Mars in the past few decades.<\/p>\n But we can\u2019t extrapolate that model to the outer Solar System, simply because it takes much too long to get to those destinations. So that\u2019s where \u201cRobotic Space Exploration 3.0\u201d comes in. It involves a more intelligent, more adaptive robot capable of diving into a highly unknown environment \u2014 a robot that can learn by itself [and] adapt by itself to robustly explore the environment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n