Miniature Robots To Conduct Research Below The Ice Will Be Used To Bridge The Gap Between Space And Antarctica

The DLR project line TRIPLE starts its second phase, with MARUM serving as the project’s coordinator.

The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action is supporting the second phase of the TRIPLE project line. A tiny autonomous vehicle is being created for sub-ice technology missions as part of the research project TRIPLE-nanoAUV 2, which is housed at the University of Bremen’s MARUM Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences. The vehicle and all of its supporting equipment will be tested in Antarctica in 2026.

Scientists have long assumed that behind the ice covers of the moons Enceladus and Europa, there exist oceans of water. Even if it is located beneath an ice layer, the presence of water can imply the possibility of life even in outer space. But on Earth, and much more so in outer space, the in­vest­ig­a­tion of such water bodies lying kilometres beneath an ice sheet is a huge challenge. How are high-tech instruments able to penetrate the thick ice crust, and how is it possible to explore the underlying ocean in the extreme environmental conditions that exist there? What types of scientific sensors are needed there to look for life signs? How are samples recovered? How is this possible?

The primary purpose of the collaborative project TRIPLE-nanoAUV 2, which is coordinated at MARUM, is to address the technological challenges. The term TRIPLE stands for “Tech­no­lo­gies for Rapid Ice Pen­et­ra­tion and subgla­cial Lake Ex­plor­a­tion.” It is a part of the DLR Explorer initiatives, together with the collaborative TRIPLE projects TRIPLE-GNC and TRIPLE-LifeDetect. The TRIPLE projects’ developments will be combined in Phase 2 and tested together in a field trial in the spring of 2026 under the Antarctic ice shelf close to Neumayer III Station.

An LRS (Launch and Re­cov­ery Sys­tem) and a small autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) will be built at MARUM for this purpose in collaboration with industry partners from the aerospace and underwater acoustic areas, as well as from the other related TRIPLE projects. The nanoAUV will be able to dock with an underwater station using the LRS in order to transmit the data it has collected and charge its batteries, allowing it to stay below for an extended period of time. The vehicle will be much smaller than typical under-ice vehicles, with a diameter of approximately 10 and a length of about 50 centimetres, because it must be transported through the ice as payload within a melting probe.

The subglacial lakes beneath Antarctica’s continental ice are thought to contain undiscovered eco­sys­tems. Exploration of the water body, which is 4,000 metres thick with ice, is technologically quite necessary. According to project leader Prof. Ralf Bachmayer of MARUM – Cen­ter for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen, “Such nano-vehicles can help to provide a bet­ter over­all under­stand­ing of marine eco­sys­tems.” In the future, it could be possible to explore the worldwide liquid water ocean beneath the frozen surfaces of Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus thanks to the new autonomous system, which is novel. The main challenge in its development is miniaturisation, with the probe dictating the overall size. Additionally, each participant must be capable of with­stand the high pres­sure un­der wa­ter.”

Sebastian Meckel, principal engineer, explains that the goal is to gather expertise within the DLR Explorer initiatives that may be applied to a potential international space mission. “The melt­ing probe with the nanoAUV integrated as pay­load will be deployed in ice with a thickness of 100 metres for the initial field testing. Additionally, the nanoAUV has limited manoeuvrability because it is un­der­actu­ated in comparison to larger autonomous vehicles. The associates from Triple-GNC and Triple-LifeDetect must have extremely high reliability and close coordination in order to accomplish this.

The project expands on the development concepts for the autonomous vehicle and a docking station as a follow-up to the collaborative projects TRIPLE-nanoAUV1 and TRIPLE-MoDo. The melt­ing probe, which will pierce Neumayer III’s ice cover and deliver the nanoAUV into the underlying water, has already been developed as part of the parallel project TRIPLE-IceCraft. Other related projects involve developing the autonomous vehicle’s scientific payload and navigation software, among other things. Additionally, findings from the ROBEX project are also included, in which MARUM played a significant role. For the first time, robotic systems have been developed for extreme environments and deep-sea and space research have been combined.

The current project is being coordinated by MARUM and the University of Bremen with the assistance of business partners DSI Aerospace Tech­no­lo­gie GmbH in Bremen and EvoLo­gics GmbH in Berlin. The project will be funded in full at the tune of 2.68 million Euros through September 2026. The German Space Agency’s DLR office is handling the overall coordination of the TRIPLE project line. In ad­di­tion to TRIPLE-nanoAUV, parts of the second phase in­clude the par­al­lel pro­jects TRIPLE-GNC (Guid­ance, Nav­ig­a­tion and Con­trol), TRIPLE-Life­D­e­tect (sci­entific pay­load), and TRIPLE-FRS 2 (Fore­field Re­con­nais­sance Sys­tem, for im­ple­ment­a­tion in the melt­ing head of the ice-melt­ing probe). The DLR Explorer Initiatives is divided into the TRIPLE project line.

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