This is a clue to Europa's biggest secret: its frozen icy shell floats above a vast hidden ocean of salty water, warmed by Jupiter's intense tidal embrace.

 

The ocean of Europa is thought to be over six miles/ deep, deeper than any on Earth. If so, there is more water hidden on Europe than on our own blue planet. And with water comes the possibility of life.

 

It sounds like a place where life might exist. It's protected from the radiation / environment underneath all of the ice. And it's sort of the same sort of temperatures and pressures as we have on Earth’s oceans. I have friends in the oceanographic community. They want to get well right now. It’s like….., show me a hole, I get it, you know, I… it’s a robot that is submersible down there.

 

If there is life down here, the challenge is getting to it.

 

Bill Stone has gone where no man has gone before. A pioneering cave diver and aerospace engineer, he now wants to go diving in an alien ocean some 500 million miles from home. And he's developing the technology to do it.

 

We started off with the idea of two things. One is the schedule，the SWIMS, has to be intelligent enough to understand where it is. What we wanted to create was a field microbiologist on silicon that did everything that a good microbiologist would go and do in the field.

 

His Depth X, and endurance / intelligent autonomous robots, have already proven themselves as very capable explorers in impossible underwater situations, mapping deep subterranean caverns in Mexico and now, exploring deep below ice-covered lakes in Antarctic