Meet GROVER the Rover, NASA's New Extreme Polar Explorer (Video)

Meet GROVER, NASA's new polar rover that can withstand the extreme temperatures felt in icy climates. The space agency has now tested this new rover on the Greenland ice sheet and has found that not only can it defy wind gusts of up to 30 mph, but it can also operate completely autonomously.

GROVER actually stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research. It was first designed by teams of students attending engineering boot camps during the summers of 2010 and 2011 and possesses the ability to detect exactly how deep and how thick the layers of ice and snow are on ice sheets. After being fine-tuned with NASA funding, GROVER was ready for a test run.

The rover was first tested at a beach in Maryland and then in the snow in Idaho. Yet it wasn't until Greenland that the rover met its true challenge. The researchers wanted to make sure that GROVER could execute commands that were sent remotely over an Iridium satellite connection.

"When we saw it moving and travelling to the locations our professor had keyed in from Boise, we knew all of our hard work had paid off," said Gabriel Trisca, a graduate student involved in the GROVER project, in a news release. "GROVER has grown to be a fully-autonomous, GPS-guided and satellite-linked platform for scientific research."

The rover wasn't just able to perform commands sent remotely, though. It also collected data as it cruised across Greenland. GROVER collected and stored radar data over 18 miles during the five weeks it spent on the ice. It was also able to transmit information in real time to researchers to tell them exactly how its onboard systems were performing.

So what could GROVER be used for? Understanding the Greenland ice sheet and its history is more important than ever as temperatures continue to warm across the globe. In fact, Greenland's surface layer vaulted into the news in the summer of 2012 when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting across a staggering 97 percent of the ice sheet. Actually learning how solid the ice is may allow scientists to predict what kind of melting the ice sheet could see in the future. With its instruments, GROVER can do just that.

"One thing I can imagine is having a big robot like GROVER with several smaller ones that can move radially outwards to increase the swath GROVER would cover," said Hans-Peter Marshall, a geoscientists at Boise State University, in a news release. "Also, we've been thinking about bringing back smaller platforms to a larger one to recharge."

Want to see the rover for yourself? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.