My Name is Britney Schmidt, I'm a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology
What ARTEMIS is going to do is it's diving down below the sea ice.
So we're standing on sea ice right now. There's a big access hole,
so we dive ARTEMIS down underneath then we swim out under the ice shelf.
What's unique about ARTEMIS is that it is a relatively long range vehicle,
And what the instrument package does for us is give us a kind of a robot oceanographer,
as well as some information about biology in the area.
What's happening here with ARTEMIS is we're opening a door to a future of robotic exploration in science.
This is the first stage of intelligent vehicles to go below a place that previously had been completely unexplored.
The Ross Ice Shelf in general, and all of the other ice shelves around Antarctica remain the largest, last unexplored territory on earth.
The Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France, and nobody knows what's going on down there.
This is the opening of the door of how to begin that exploration.
I think you're going to see this as the paradigm for a lot of future Antarctic exploration
whether here or in hundreds of subglacial lakes that exist under the Antarctic ice cap.
We're just the first wave, I look forward over the next 10-15
years to seeing much more interesting, long range expeditions coming out of this project.
SIMPLE is a NASA funded project that is looking at analogues on earth for processes and remote sensing techniques
and in situ techniques for going to the icy worlds of the outer solar system.
Specifically we're focused on Europa.
Europa is the innermost icy moon of Jupiter.
What's special about Europa is that it's actually more like the Earth than any place in the outer solar system.
In the outer solar system, ice and oceans are actually fairly frequent.
What's interesting is that Europa exists in an area where it gets energy from tides.
When we think about ingredients for life and the things that we might need to host a biosphere outside of earth,
Europa kind of rises to the top because we have a big global ocean,
it's hidden by an ice shell just like the ice that we're standing on here in Antarctica,
but underneath that, it may be very Earth-like
So this really very distant place, 5 AU away from us, is actually very much like this place that we're standing right now.
So we're asking those questions to try to understand could anything live on Europa
what would it look like and what would it depend on, and that's why we come here.
Artemis itself won't be going to Europa but the technologies and the ideas and the way that we've used them
and some of the engineering decisions and some of the science hypotheses,
those are what will be migrated forward into future, hopefully underwater, exploration in Europa.