2023 EELS Field Test at Athabasca Glacier as an Icy Moon Analog Environment

JPL is developing a versatile and highly intelligent robot called EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor) that would enable access to subsurface oceans and near-surface liquid reservoirs through existing conduits, such as the vents at the south pole of Enceladus or the putative geysers on Europa. In an ongoing project, we have prototyped two versions of the EELS robot and extensively tested them on various environments, such as snowy slopes, ice surfaces, and vertical ice walls in a walk-in freezer. In September 2023 we performed field tests on Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Ice Field in Canada, as terrestrial analogs to the surfaces and subsurface of icy moons. This paper provides a fresh and comprehensive written record of the test campaign, which had four major goals: 1) vertical mobility, 2) surface mobility, 3) science instrument tests, and 4) terramechanics experiments. The robot successfully made a ~1.5 m descent in a vertical icy hold called moulins and demonstrated surface mobility on icy surface with undulations and slopes. The capillary electrophoresis (CE) instrument built to the form factor of an EELS module was tested in flowing water on the glacier and successfully demonstrated automated sampling and in-situ analysis. The terramechanics experiments were performed on horizontal and vertical surfaces, which would inform future development. 3D LiDAR scans of multiple supraglacial and englacial features were acquired. In this paper we report the outcomes of the four tests and discuss their implications for potential future icy missions. The field test also demonstrated EELS’s ability to support Earth science missions. Another potential near-term follow-on could be a technology demonstration on the Moon.