This drone demonstrating its ability to travel into the heart of a mountain glacier suggests the technology could also be used by scientists to study ice and climate as well as narrow crevices in cave expanses.

The Swiss robotics firm that designed this unit teamed up with an alpine search and rescue team to use the drone in one of the world’s most extreme environments: a glacier nearly 11,500 feet above sea level on the Matterhorn mountain near Zermatt, Switzerland.

The drone, designed to turn freely inside a protective enclosure, enters a narrow opening in the ice that would be extremely dangerous for a person to explore and bounces off the walls without taking any damage and comes back out again.

The drone the Swiss team Flyability is calling the “Gimball” is specifically intended for use in narrow and dangerous areas. “whether it’s in a tank, in a chimney, a cluttered house or a collapsed building,”

Or even in a crevasse of a glacier in the Swiss Alps, where it looks like the Gimball may help rescuers find accident victims while reducing some of the inherent risks of the job.

The robot won a $1 million prize at the 2015 “Drones for Good Award” competition sponsored by the United Arab Emirates.

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