DEPTHX

The Deep Phreatic Thermal Explorer (DEPTHX) is an autonomous underwater vehicle designed and built by Stone Aerospace, an aerospace engineering firm based in Austin, Texas. It was designed to autonomously explore and map underwater sinkholes in northern Mexico, as well as collect water and wall core samples. The DEPTHX vehicle was the first of three vehicles to be built by Stone Aerospace which were funded by NASA with the goal of developing technology that can explore the oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa to look for extraterrestrial life.

DEPTHX was a collaborative project for which Stone Aerospace was the principal investigator. Co-investigators included Carnegie Mellon University, which was responsible for the navigation and guidance software, the Southwest Research Institute, which built the vehicle's science payload, and research scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, the Colorado School of Mines, and NASA Ames Research Center.

In 1999, Bill Stone had been involved in an underwater surveying project in Wakulla Springs, Florida. For that project, Stone had devised a digital wall mapper that was propelled by a diver propulsion vehicle and steered by divers which was designed to create a 3-D map of Wakulla Springs using an array of sonars, as well as a suite of other sophisticated sensors. The success of this project, the Wakulla Springs 2 Project, attracted the interest of planetary scientist Dan Durda from the Southwest Research Institute, who wished to create a similar piece of technology to explore the oceans of Europa, but one that could drive itself autonomously. Stone accepted the challenge, and several collaborative proposals were submitted to NASA. It wasn't until 2003 that NASA would finally fund DEPTHX as a three-year, $5 million project.

...
Wikipedia