Conceptual Design of Submarine to Explore Europa’s Oceans

A conceptual design of an unmanned robot submarine is presented to explore one of the moons of the planet Jupiter, namely, Europa. This moon is a little smaller than our Earth’s moon but contains a lot of water; in fact the oceans on Europa are some $96\mathrm{km}$ deep and contain about 5 times the amount of water that our Earth’s oceans contain. Thus, it is likely that large sea animals may exist on Europa supported by hydrothermal vents and these animals will prove of interest to scientists. To satisfy these scientific interests, it is the writer’s belief that a robot submarine will be landing on Europa within the next $20\text{years}$ . This paper discusses some of the problems that will be encountered in the design, construction, and operation of this robot submarine. For example, even though the internal diameter of the submarine may only be $1\mathrm{m}$ , it will not be possible to build the submarine from a metal; as such a structure will have no reserve buoyancy and will sink like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. Even vessels built in glass fiber reinforced plastic and carbon fiber reinforced plastic have only fractional positive buoyancy. This paper shows that for the vessel to have adequate reserve buoyancy, it will be necessary to build the submarine hull in a metal matrix or ceramic composite. This paper discusses different methods of providing power, but favors a fuel cell for this purpose. This paper also discusses the hostile environment that the submarine is likely to encounter on this moon.