Through-Ice Acoustic Communication for Ocean Worlds Exploration

• Published in: Sensors
• Main Authors: Hyeong Jae Lee, Yoseph Bar-Cohen, Mircea Badescu, Stewart Sherrit, Benjamin Hockman, Scott Bryant, Samuel M. Howell, Elodie Lesage, Miles Smith
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2024
• Subjects: acoustics; communication; Ocean Worlds missions; planetary exploration; Europa; Chemical technology; TP1-1185; glacier; Alaska
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.3390/s24092776; https://doaj.org/article/e7dd5cfdeec44729b7ff200b42cb03e4

Subsurface exploration of ice-covered planets and moons presents communications challenges because of the need to communicate through kilometers of ice. The objective of this task is to develop the capability to wirelessly communicate through kilometers of ice and thus complement the potentially failure-prone tethers deployed behind an ice-penetrating probe on Ocean Worlds. In this paper, the preliminary work on the development of wireless deep-ice communication is presented and discussed. The communication test and acoustic attenuation measurements in ice have been made by embedding acoustic transceivers in glacial ice at the Matanuska Glacier, Anchorage, Alaska. Field test results show that acoustic communication is viable through ice, demonstrating the transmission of data and image files in the 13–18 kHz band over 100 m. The results suggest that communication over many kilometers of ice thickness could be feasible by employing reduced transmitting frequencies around 1 kHz, though future work is needed to better constrain the likely acoustic attenuation properties through a refrozen borehole.