The Saturnian moon Enceladus with its extensive water bodies underneath a thick ice sheet cover is a potential candidate for extraterrestrial life. Direct exploration of such extraterrestrial aquatic ecosystems requires advanced access and sampling technologies with a high level of autonomy. An innovative exploration concept has been developed as part of the research consortium Enceladus Explorer (2012-14). It is based upon the minimally invasive melting probe IceMole, which enables\u00a0to travel along a curved trajectory and\u00a0allows obstacle avoidance as well as target selection maneuvers. These maneuvers, however, necessitate a sophisticated on-board navigation system capable of autonomous operations including in-ice attitude determination, localization, and forefield exploration, which are integrated through a high-level sensor fusion. The Enceladus Explorer Initiative (EnEx)<\/a>, established by the DLR Space Administration in 2015, addresses these challenges and contributes to developing key technologies for a future exploration mission to Enceladus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Enceladus Explorer Initiative The Saturnian moon Enceladus with its extensive water bodies underneath a thick ice sheet cover is a potential candidate for extraterrestrial life. Direct exploration of such extraterrestrial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1166,"featured_media":0,"parent":6,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"c2c_always_allow_admin_comments":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-37","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/37\/revisions\/44"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rwth-aachen.de\/gfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}