Three future missions are headed to faraway moons Europa, Enceladus, and Titan to search for life. To help, scientists are testing their techniques here in our backyard.
on my snowmobile, it skitters and glides across a sea of snow and ice. In the dusky twilight, the landscape is painted in shades of ethereal blue. I’m heading back to town after spending the day crisscrossing a frozen fjord, one of many in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a cluster of mountainous islands in the high Arctic where auroras often dance overhead and narwhals, belugas, and walruses patrol the seas.
Similarly, scientists used to think a world’s habitability depended on its distance from the sun. But that picture is incomplete.
To explore Aurora, German and his colleagues brought one of the most advanced uncrewed submersibles on Earth: an orange, minivan-size vehicle calledFestooned with stickers, some reflecting a recent collaboration between Woods Hole and NASA, the three-million-dollar machine is designed to explore under-ice ecosystems. It can dive three miles down, swim more than 25 miles, and operate for half a day without recharging.
On a scale of zero to 10, I asked German, how worried are you? “Ten,” he said. “Ten. There’s a legitimate risk of a very bad thing.” Returning home withoutthe team’s prized instrument, the potential forebear of tomorrow’s spacefaring submersibles—would be “pretty atrocious,” he said. It’s so close to the vents that if we could turn onNUI
This past February I visited central Italy’s Frasassi cave system with scientists searching for some of Earth’s least known creatures: microbes that live deep within the cave’s underwater passages. Growing in toxic, oxygen-starved waters, these improbable communities are powered by the slow burn of water interacting with the rock itself, producing metabolic fuels such as hydrogen sulfide and methane—just like the organisms that depend on oceanic hydrothermal vents.
In the aquifer’s depths, a layer of clear fresh water sits atop salt water that’s saturated with toxic hydrogen sulfide. That lower layer bubbles up from deep within the Earth, and in addition to being smelly, it’s anoxic—there’s no dissolved oxygen to power microbial metabolisms. “In that hydrogen sulfide layer, we expected to find almost nothing,” Macalady said. “Instead, we found a forest of microbes unexpectedly making a living.
On the desolate Arctic sea floor near the Aurora vent field, life makes do with what it can get. Here a red shrimp swims above a glass sponge, which is a filigreed creature made mostly of silica—material abundant on the ocean floor.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited. In 2005, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dropped a European Space Agency probe into the nitrogen atmosphere surrounding Titan. During its two-and a-half-hour descent,it snapped images presented here at four altitudes in Mercator projection. They revealed the moon’s surface is a deceptively Earthlike landscape. But the chemistries are alien: Liquids are methane and ethane, while pebbles are rock-hard water ice.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
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