In 2025, NASA funded LEAP, a jumping robot concept designed to bound directly through the geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, collecting water and ice expelled from its buried ocean. The appeal is beautifully simple: instead of drilling through kilometres of ice to reach the ocean, let the ocean erupt directly into the robot’s sampler.

In 2025, NASA funded LEAP, a jumping robot concept designed to bound directly through the geysers of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, collecting water and ice expelled from its buried ocean. The appeal is beautifully simple: instead of drilling through kilometres of ice to reach the ocean, let the ocean erupt directly into the robot’s sampler.

Enceladus presents planetary scientists with an unusual offer. Its ocean is buried beneath ice, but some of that ocean is already carried upward through fractures at the moon’s south pole and sprayed into space as water vapour and frozen grains. A mission may not need to build the entire route down if it can meet the material coming up. That inversion is the heart of LEAP, or Legged Exploration Across the Plume, a concept led by Justin Yim of th…