NASA has come up with a robot which will be used to help the researchers in putting together a map in 3D of a fissure which is now inactive in the volcano Kilauea in Hawaii.
This research may be very helpful in the study that will be carried out to understand the extraterrestrial volcanoes.
Fissures are a very commonly found physical feature on both Mars as well as Earth through which the magma erupts.
This probably even occurred on the now inactive volcanoes that have been found on Mercury, Moon, Europa and Enceladus. But the mechanism of these volcanic eruptions on the planetary bodies is still unknown.
This was reported to have been told by Carolyn Parcheta, who has worked with a robot known as VolcanoBot1 in Hawaii back in May 2014.
VolcanoBot1 was also tested in the Kilauea volcano found in Hawaii and now VolcanoBot2 will also be tested on the same volcano this year.
Parcheta and Aaron Parness, her co – advisor, are working on developing robots which have the ability to get into crevices. These crevices have remained inaccessible in the past and exploring them might help in gaining information about these geological features.
The VolcanoBot1 was capable of descending to a depth of about 82 feet in a couple of locations in the fissure. It could have gone deeper had there been a longer tether. Due to the insufficiency of the length of the tether the robot could not go down to the bottom on both attempts.