Engineers are testing a unique autonomous four-wheeled vehicle called Yeti that they hope will soon be cruising the polar regions of the planet bringing back climate, ice and atmospheric data.

While rovers are exploring the undersea world, and have been sent to Mars, it's one of the first times engineers have figured out how to make one work in sub-freezing temperatures at the Earth's polar zone in the frozen wastelands of Greenland .

"If successful, the scientists will get to use these machines to get to places they can't get to," said Laura Ray, professor of engineering at Dartmouth University and principal investigator on the Yeti project. "You could do a grid survey several times and create much better models of the dynamics of melting under ice sheets."