To Boldly Go Where No Robots Have Gone Before – Part 1: EELS Robot to Spearhead a New One-Shot Exploration Paradigm with in-situ Adaptation

Historically, robotic space exploration has been conducted in a sequence of incrementally more sophisticated missions, starting from flyby and orbiting, followed by simple landing and roving missions, and eventually complex robotic missions involving long-range driving, drilling, or sample return. The benefit of this approach is that capabilities can be specifically designed for narrowly defined environmental conditions. For example, the development and V&V of the complex robotic functions of the Mars rover Perseverance, such as the autonomous driving and the sampling and caching system, were heavily informed by the environmental knowledge brought by previous Mars missions. However, now that NASA is destined to explore a multitude of more challenging worlds, we will likely not enjoy the luxury of sending a series of spacecraft to the same destination due to the budgetary constraints, scarcity of flight opportunities, and the extensive cruise time to the Outer Solar System and beyond. We argue that a new robotic exploration paradigm will be needed, which replaces an incremental exploration campaign with a single-shot mission where a robot or a team of robots adapts its behavior after arrival and increasingly elevates the level of behavioral complexity as it learns about the new environment. A key enabler of such adaptive one-shot exploration is highly versatile robotic hardware combined with onboard intelligence. We developed a snake-like versatile and intelligent robot, namely Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), which would enable access to the subsurface ocean of icy moons by descending into an erupting vent, such as the ones on Enceladus. By combining its high-DOF mechanical system (Gildner, et al. 2024), the active skin propulsion system (Marteau, et al. 2024), and the new adaptive autonomy software framework called NEO Autonomy (R. Thakker, M. Paton, et al. 2023), ) we demonstrated by numerous lab and field tests that EELS can locomote in a wide range of environmental conditions, including sand-covered surface, undulating ice, high-slope snow, and vertical glacial hole, by switching between wildly different mobility gaits. It is particularly notable that EELS made ~1.5 m fully autonomous vertical descents in natural ice holes on Athabasca Glacier in Canada. This paper first highlights the limitations of the current incremental exploration paradigm and builds an argument for the adaptive, one-shot exploration paradigm by drawing insights from a number of flight and research projects. It will then provide a broad overview of the vision, technologies, scientific impacts, capabilities, and field test results of EELS, while the three companion papers (Gildner, et al. 2024), (Marteau, et al. 2024), and (R. Thakker, M. Paton, et al. 2023) provides the detailed description of the hardware, active skin propulsion, and autonomy systems of EELS, respectively.