 "Photo: Veronica Hansen")
In late May, researchers, including a group of UT graduate students, finished their final exploration of the El Zacaton sinkhole in coastal Mexico. El Zacaton is the largest water-filled sinkhole in the world.
Scientists are hopeful that research conducted along the east coast of Mexico may provide a means to continue exploration of space and perhaps one day find life on other planets.
UT geological sciences graduate student Marcus Gary and UT geology professor John Sharp were part of the team that investigated the land and its life forms and mapped the sinkhole all the way to the bottom - 319 meters deep. Gary was one of the first people to pursue interest in the area.
Gary first visited the sinkhole in 1993 and returned to it in 1994 with a group of cave divers that included Jim Bowden, a former UT diving instructor, and Florida diver Sheck Exley. Bowden set a record by cave diving 925 feet into El Zacaton. Exley did not make it back to the surface alive. Nevertheless, the immense depth of this cave interested Gary, who was curious about the make-up of the area.
Gary began planning a way to explore the depths of the sinkhole. Realizing that conventional diving equipment could not do the job, he sought other options. His ideas eventually led to the development of the Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer, or DEPTHX.
Six years ago, the group that became responsible for the DEPTHX met at Gary's house for a barbecue. The group, which included Bill Stone of Stone Aerospace, Sharp and Gary, decided to build a robot that could navigate the sinkhole and accurately map it out.
After the National Science Foundation denied the group funding, they decided to approach NASA for their project. After much deliberation, NASA decided to help fund the robot that was eventually made by Stone Aerospace in Austin, Sharp said.
"NASA said no guts, no glory," Sharp said. "So there's the robot. It's about the size of a small Volkswagen."
The robot is capable of sensing its surroundings and avoiding obstacles while simultaneously mapping the area it is traveling across with 3-D pictures. With its navigational system, DEPTHX can also follow a map it created to get back home.
NASA hopes to use the autonomous robot for future exploration in aquatic areas including Antarctica, with hopes of it someday being used to explore Europa, one of Jupiter's moons that is currently covered in ice.
"They hope to have the technology to study Europa sometime between 2018 and 2020," Gary said.
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