How’s this for a travel itinerary: First stop, Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. Then a little trip under a frozen Antarctic lake, and finally a blowout finish under the icy seas of the Jovian moon Europa.
That’s roughly the plan for the Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer (ENDURANCE) probe, a NASA-funded project designed to make 3D maps of underwater environments, take microbial samples and gather other data on difficult-to-reach depths.