Indeed it is -- the water-filled tunnel that the Cryobot melts in the ice
freezes solid again less than a meter above its rear end (and the sheer
pressure of the ice just a few hundred meters down would quickly squeeze the
tunnel shut even if this didn't happen). The only way to get any vehicle
back up to the surface is to have it melt its way all the way back up just
as it melted its way down, using some kind of hooked propulsive system to
grip the walls of the melt space and heave itself upward into the bargain --
and while Honeybee Robotics is working on the design of an "Inchworm"
subsurface tunneler that could do just that, they readily admit that it's a
project for considerably more distant in the future than the one-way Cryobot
we're talking about.
Well group, I may have a contact here that can help. I've made a contact with Dean David Woodall, at the University of Fairbanks. Dean Woodall is promoting a study to research micro-sensors, tiny control devices, and radio transmission through dense matter, such as ice. I'll keep working on this, and see if I can gain a little interest here.
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As to the actual, Europa bound cryobot... why in the world would you want to hook your way back up a tunnel, when presumeably, the probe could:
1) reverse course or switch head to tail, and backtrack, along the same tunnel,
2) using a hydrogen filled balloon, it could presumeably float back to the surface. The hydrogen bag might presumeably be stored in the front of the Europa cryobot. Once the cryobot is prepared to reverse course, the bag might be filled with hydrogen electolyzed from the local ice.
3) At that point, the cryobot tail heats up to become the nose, and the model cuts through the ice, and floats back to the surface, slowly but surely, on a bag of hydrogen below it.
Just a thought.
-- JHB
