The idea of life on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, is one of the most intriguing hypotheticals in the solar system. Ever since the Voyager missions first flew past the tiny, icy world in 1979, the idea of figuring out what, if anything lies below that ice has grabbed at minds ranging from Arthur C. Clarke to Dr. Charles Elachi, Director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

As it stands, the current plans for a Europa mission doesn't sound too dissimilar from the old Voyager and Galileo missions, involving "

45 flybys, during which the spacecraft would image the moon's icy surface at high resolution and investigate its composition and the structure of its interior and icy shell." However, a concept funded by NASA has the potential to make the mission a lot smaller, with swarms of tiny satellites invading Europa's surface.

The satellites, charmingly called "ChipSats," would be able to generate data that could only be attained on the surface, specifically relating to thickness of Europa's famed icy surface, and how far down it's probable-but-still-hypothetical ocean is. As useful as flybys are, there really isn't any substitute for getting information on the ground, especially the type that would be retained by "thousands" of robots, say proponents of the idea.

Challenges still remain, chief among them being Jupiter's lethal radiation belts. The first plan for a flyby mission was to have the satellite dip in and out the gas giant's orbital field to capture pictures of the moon, like a spy mission behind enemy lines. To land on a surface, a new paper is proposing "Kevlar as the substrate for ChipSats measuring 2 cm sq. (0.8 in.) by 1.57mm (0.6 in.) thick and weighing 3 grams. The stronger material would help a statistically significant subset of the tiny landers to survive impact with the surface ice," say Brett Streetman, Joseph Shoer and Richard Stoner of Draper Laboratory and Cornell's Mason Peck, a former NASA chief technologist.

But despite all the very real challenges, NASA and JPL have got something that they haven't had in a while: congressional funding. They've got $150 million to spend on designing the Europa mission, which is more the departments originally asked for. It's highly likely they'll receive another $50 million by 2017. Along with a manned mission to Mars, finding life in the solar system is one of the things that could reinvigorate widespread interest in the space program. And it's starting to look like tiny robots are just the way to get that done.

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