The cryobot was invented by German physicist Karl
Philberth, who first demonstrated it in the 1960s as part of the International Glaciological Greenland Expedition (EGIG), achieving drilling depths in excess of . In 1973 British scientists in
Antarctica performed airborne ice-penetrating
radar survey and detected a possible lake. In 1991, the European
remote sensing satellite
ERS-1 confirmed the 1973 discovery of a large lake below four kilometers of ice, now named
Lake Vostok. The lake, which is the fifth largest freshwater lake in the world, is thought to be uncontaminated. In 2002 NASA was planning to use a cryobot to explore the lake, but the project did not happen. In 2011, NASA awarded
Stone Aerospace $4 million to fund the Phase 2 of project
VALKYRIE (Very-Deep Autonomous Laser-Powered Kilowatt-Class Yo-Yoing Robotic Ice Explorer). This project aims to create an autonomous cryobot capable of melting through vast amounts of ice. The probe's power source differs from many other designs in that it does not rely on nuclear power to generate heat, but rather the power of a high energy laser fed to it through a fiber optic cable. This is beneficial because nuclear probes are not allowed for testing in Antarctica as a result of
the Antarctic Treaty. Phase 2 of project VALKYRIE consisted of testing a scaled-down version of the cryobot in Matanuska Glacier, Alaska in 2015. Following the success of these missions, Phase 3 of the project is then used a full-scale version of the cryobot to melt its way to a subglacial lake, collect samples, and then resurface. integrated to an intelligent algorithm for autonomous scientific sampling and navigation. The test was performed in 2017 on a probe called "Archimedes". Stone Aerospace integrated their ARTEMIS submersible with the VALKYRIE laser technology to develop a sophisticated cryobot called
SPINDLE (Sub-glacial Polar Ice Navigation, Descent, and Lake Exploration). This third phase of the project would be viewed as a precursor to possible future missions to the icy moons of
Europa, a moon of
Jupiter, and
Enceladus, a moon of
Saturn, to explore the liquid water oceans thought to be present below their ice, and assess their
potential habitability. == See also ==