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Some places on the surface you might have these steep cracks and giant fissures

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that you would have to be careful not to fall into

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In other places, you might see towers of ice

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right next to places that are relatively smooth

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You might see places that were dark

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Ice there takes the form of rock. It's frozen solid until you dig down into that ocean

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So you may see somethings that look similar to Earth, but you may see things that are very different

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NASA Explorers

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Cryosphere

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Frozen World

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Episode Five

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That voice you just heard?

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I am Morgan Cable, NASA scientist!

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That's Morgan.

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She’s probably one of NASA’s best spokespeople for exploring our solar system’s icy moons

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Europa is a fascinating place

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It has this liquid water ocean that’s about three times the volume of all of Earth’s oceans combined

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That’s a lot of water

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To understand what makes Earth so special,

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sometimes you need to back up and take in the big picture

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Remember, the cryosphere is every place on Earth with frozen water

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And water is one of the biggest indicators for life

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Every place, at least so far, that we’ve found life we’ve found water along with it

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And so far, Earth is the only planet we know of with life

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Although Europa isn’t the only icy moon in our solar system,

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NASA has identified it as one of those places with key astro-biological potential

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Morgan is a collaborator on the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa

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an instrument selected for NASA’s next mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa

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But she’s also more than just a scientist working in a laboratory

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She’s preparing future NASA missions for success on the surface of alien worlds

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This year, Morgan and her colleagues were in the field studying how life colonizes in fresh lava

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Earth it turns out has a lot of excellent, what we call, analog environments

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– places that are similar enough to some of these other worlds

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that we can conduct some tests and we can do some analysis here

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Now they’re not perfect, of course.

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They’re not going to be exactly like Europa, but we can still learn a lot by testing in these environments

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Some of these places include Antarctica and the Arctic Circle

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But there are other places too – Alaska, Greenland and even Iceland

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Any place where you have a lot of ice, because guess what the surface of Europa is made of...a lot of ice!

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Studying the cryosphere doesn’t just have big implications for Earth

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It also matters for the frozen worlds in our own cosmic backyard

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If we're able to find life, or evidence of past life on a place like Europa

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that tells us that not only can life happen in other places

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but it's common enough that it happened at least twice in the same tiny solar system

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That means that the universe is wide open in terms of how much life we might find

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- the types of life we might find!

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It would revolutionize how we see ourselves and the possibilities for contact in the universe

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It just...it would be amazing

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It's so exciting!

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On the next episode of Cryosphere

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As it flows down the valleys, it actually carves those valleys out

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and makes them deeper, and so it creates these beautiful fjords

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where the ice flows down, snakes out down to the ocean, or to the lakes, or further inland

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and so that ice is flowing, it's moving

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Episode Six: High Mountain Glaciers

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