Europa and other ocean worlds in our solar system have recently attracted much attention. They are thought to be some of the most likely places in our solar system for life to have developed off Earth, given the presence of liquid water under their ice sheathes and our understanding of liquid water as one of the necessities for the development of life.

Various missions are planned to these ocean worlds, but many suffer from numerous design constraints. Requirements to break through kilometers of ice on a world far from the sun will do that to any mission. These design constraints sometimes make it difficult for the missions to achieve one of their most important functions—the search for life. But a team of engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory think they have a solution—send forth a swarm of swimming microbots to scour the ocean beneath a main "mothership" bot.

One of the most likely forms of the mothership bot for this mission is the Subsurface Access Mechanism for Europa—SESAME.