Some of the most tantalizing targets in space exploration are frozen ice worlds. Take Jupiter's moon Europa, for instance. Its warm, salty subsurface ocean is buried under a moon-wide sheet of ice. What's the best way to explore it?

Maybe an ice robot could play a role.

Though the world's space agencies—especially NASA—are getting better and better at building robots to explore places like Mars, those robots have limitations. Perhaps chief among those limitations is the possibility of breakdown. Once a rover on Mars—or somewhere even more distant—breaks down, it's game over. There's no feasible way to repair something like MSL Curiosity if it breaks down while exploring the Martian surface.

But what if the world being explored was a frozen one, and the robot was made of ice? Could icy robots perform self-repair, even in a limited fashion? Could they actually be manufactured and assembled there, even partly?