B-roll for media. A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is creating and testing a snake-like robot called EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor). Inspired by a desire to descend vents on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus and enter the subsurface ocean, this versatile snake robot is being developed by JPL to autonomously map, traverse, and explore previously inaccessible destinations on Earth, the Moon, and other worlds in the solar system. The reel includes tests conducted between 2019 and 2023 in a variety of sandy, snowy, and icy environments, including the Mars-like terrain at JPL’s Mars Yard, a “robot playground” created at a ski resort in the snowy mountains of Southern California, and even an indoor ice rink. It also includes a narrated animation of the initial EELS concept of operations at Enceladus. In its current form, the EELS 1.0 robot weighs about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and is 13 feet (4 meters) long. EELS is funded by the Office of Technology Infusion and Strategy at JPL in Southern California through a technology accelerator program called JPL Next. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California. The EELS team has worked with a number of university partners on the project, including Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of California, San Diego. The robot is not currently part of any NASA mission. For more information on the project go to: [ Ссылка ] Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech | @BeautyOfTheUniverse | #BeautyOfTheUniverse

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