Rocket scientists build robot probes to gauge melting beneath Antarctic ice shelf

LOS ANGELES — Engineers who specialize in building NASA spacecraft to explore distant worlds are designing a fleet of underwater robot probes to measure how rapidly climate change is melting vast ice sheets around Antarctica and what that means for rising sea levels. A prototype of the submersible vehicles, under development by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles, was tested from a U.S. Navy laboratory camp in the Arctic, where it was deployed beneath the frozen Beaufort Sea north of Alaska in March. “These robots are a platform to bring science instruments to the hardest-to-reach locations on Earth,” Paul Glick,more