VIPER REXUS

One of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, has an icy surface, covering an ocean. In this ocean, there could be evidence for life. To get there, a probe needs to melt through the ice. So far, there haven't been any experiments dealing with melting into ice in vaccum under micro gravity conditions. We are designing an experiment to gather some information to this problem. Therefor, a probe is heated up to a constant temperature and is pressed on an ice block with a spring to melt into the ice. The ice block's walls are temperature-stabilized to determine conductive losses through the ice. The process will be analyzed by sensors and an optical and IR camera. The process will take place in low-pressure conditions (pressure below 6 mbar) and under the influence of micro-gravity. It is planned to have three ice samples on the experiment for redundancy or to sample three different kinds of ice. Melting into the samples will occure simultaneously to have the longest possible experiment time.