
Copernical Team
NASA missions help investigate an 'old faithful' active galaxy

Researchers use LRZ HPC resources to perform largest-ever supersonic turbulence simulation

'Old Faithful' cosmic eruption shows black hole ripping at star

The earliest supermassive black hole and quasar in the universe

Defense, Commerce departments join to find 5G solutions

DARPA seeks compact, deployable electron accelerator

Cultivating plant growth in space

Astronomers finally measure polarized light from exoplanet

Director General’s annual press conference 2021

Join our start-of-year press conference with ESA Director General Jan Wörner and future Director General Josef Aschbacher plus other ESA Directors when they meet online on Thursday, 14 January 2021. The event starts at 09:30 GMT / 10:30 CET. Watch live on #ESAwebTV.
A robot made of ice could adapt and repair itself on other worlds

Some of the most tantalizing targets in space exploration are frozen ice worlds. Take Jupiter's moon Europa, for instance. Its warm, salty subsurface ocean is buried under a moon-wide sheet of ice. What's the best way to explore it?
Maybe an ice robot could play a role.
Though the world's space agencies—especially NASA—are getting better and better at building robots to explore places like Mars, those robots have limitations. Perhaps chief among those limitations is the possibility of breakdown. Once a rover on Mars—or somewhere even more distant—breaks down, it's game over. There's no feasible way to repair something like MSL Curiosity if it breaks down while exploring the Martian surface.
But what if the world being explored was a frozen one, and the robot was made of ice? Could icy robots perform self-repair, even in a limited fashion? Could they actually be manufactured and assembled there, even partly?