Some places on the surface you might have these steep cracks and giant fissures
that you would have to be careful not to fall into
In other places, you might see towers of ice
right next to places that are relatively smooth
You might see places that were dark
Ice there takes the form of rock. It's frozen solid until you dig down into that ocean
So you may see somethings that look similar to Earth, but you may see things that are very different
NASA Explorers
Cryosphere
Frozen World
Episode Five
That voice you just heard?
I am Morgan Cable, NASA scientist!
That's Morgan.
She’s probably one of NASA’s best spokespeople for exploring our solar system’s icy moons
Europa is a fascinating place
It has this liquid water ocean that’s about three times the volume of all of Earth’s oceans combined
That’s a lot of water
To understand what makes Earth so special,
sometimes you need to back up and take in the big picture
Remember, the cryosphere is every place on Earth with frozen water
And water is one of the biggest indicators for life
Every place, at least so far, that we’ve found life we’ve found water along with it
And so far, Earth is the only planet we know of with life
Although Europa isn’t the only icy moon in our solar system,
NASA has identified it as one of those places with key astro-biological potential
Morgan is a collaborator on the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa
an instrument selected for NASA’s next mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa
But she’s also more than just a scientist working in a laboratory
She’s preparing future NASA missions for success on the surface of alien worlds
This year, Morgan and her colleagues were in the field studying how life colonizes in fresh lava
Earth it turns out has a lot of excellent, what we call, analog environments
– places that are similar enough to some of these other worlds
that we can conduct some tests and we can do some analysis here
Now they’re not perfect, of course.
They’re not going to be exactly like Europa, but we can still learn a lot by testing in these environments
Some of these places include Antarctica and the Arctic Circle
But there are other places too – Alaska, Greenland and even Iceland
Any place where you have a lot of ice, because guess what the surface of Europa is made of...a lot of ice!
Studying the cryosphere doesn’t just have big implications for Earth
It also matters for the frozen worlds in our own cosmic backyard
If we're able to find life, or evidence of past life on a place like Europa
that tells us that not only can life happen in other places
but it's common enough that it happened at least twice in the same tiny solar system
That means that the universe is wide open in terms of how much life we might find
- the types of life we might find!
It would revolutionize how we see ourselves and the possibilities for contact in the universe
It just...it would be amazing
It's so exciting!
On the next episode of Cryosphere
As it flows down the valleys, it actually carves those valleys out
and makes them deeper, and so it creates these beautiful fjords
where the ice flows down, snakes out down to the ocean, or to the lakes, or further inland
and so that ice is flowing, it's moving
Episode Six: High Mountain Glaciers