Abstract EANA2025-182

The TRIPLE (Technologies for Rapid Ice Penetration and Subglacial Lake Exploration) project, which is funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), was set up to develop systems, technologies, and methodologies for exploring Europa, Jupiter's icy moon, which is believed to have a liquid, salty ocean beneath its icy shell.

To explore this aqueous environment, the IceCraft melting probe will melt through the icy shell and expose the AstroBioLab sensing module to the liquid ocean just below the ice-liquid interface.

As well as enabling the transition to the ice-liquid interface and carrying a sensing and analysis module, the melting probe carries a miniaturised autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) called the nanoAUV. This vehicle is tasked with exploring and mapping the environment around the melting probe's penetration point. It is stored and transported in the launch and recovery system (LRS), which is a module of the IceCraft. The LRS is responsible for safely storing the nanoAUV during transport, deploying and launching the vehicle into the environment, and recovering it after its mission is complete. In addition to these tasks, the LRS provides the operational basis for the nanoAUV, supporting navigation and providing basic bidirectional communication during flight, as well as high-bandwidth data communication and wireless recharging capabilities when docked to the LRS.

In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the LRS and nanoAUV system elements and their interplay, and discuss the concept of operations for autonomous nanoAUV operations in more detail. A particular focus will be on the mission execution and vehicle control and navigation approach. We will illustrate our approach using the objective of the current project phase, which is to explore the marine environment beneath the Antarctic Ekström Ice Shelf at the German Antarctic Neumayer Station III.