“You know, I wish Elon Musk cared more about finding bacteria than sending people.” “It would be great if there were some eccentric billionaires who really wanted to find life on Mars,” she said. So, for now, Nadeau is working to get people interested in her ideas while looking for funding and other opportunities to land not only on Europa but other potential places for life. But that spacecraft will only conduct flybys of Jupiter's moon. There is the Europa Clipper mission, which NASA plans to launch in the 2020s. But the lander’s webpage is sparse on specifics. Officially, the lander is still a “concept for a potential future mission,” according to NASA. With his defeat, Nadeau says any hope of a lander on Europa in the near future essentially died. He had helped infuse NASA with money and the drive to develop a lander concept and mission.īut he was defeated in last November’s election. It wasn’t accepted.Įuropa had been the favorite target for the search for life of former U.S. Last year Nadeau submitted her microscope proposal to NASA’s Instrument Concepts for Europa Exploration 2 program to get her microscope on a lander that would set down on Europa. There are also competing interests and ever-changing political currents at work here on Earth. But answering those questions is incredibly difficult. “We don’t know if what happened on Earth is unbelievably rare and we’re one planet in a billion.”Īre we alone in the universe and how did we get here are two of the great questions our species has asked, and finding life outside of Earth is what drives Nadeau and other scientists like her. “We have no idea how likely life is to evolve,” she said last week in her PSU laboratory while sitting next to ELVIS - Extant Life Volumetric Imaging System - her latest microscope funded by the National Science Foundation. A microscope, Nadeau says, could help us see tiny creatures doing what we recognize as life: moving around. We can’t just plug numbers into an equation and compute what life is. Nadeau notes there’s no chemical definition of life. Nadeau says it’s unlikely we’ll access Europa’s global ocean during our lifetimes.īut a microscope may be the perfect way to find out if life exists in such extreme and alien environments. For one, the ice shell is at least two-thirds of a mile thick, so drilling to a place to see any large sea creatures that may exist will be difficult. Jay Nadeau, a physicist at Portland State University, has designed a one-of-a-kind microscope she wants to send to Europa (and other places like it) to peek into its icy world in the search for bacteria.Įuropa presents scientists with many challenges. But absent big things, if life exits at all, maybe it’s smaller, much smaller. Maybe giant sea creatures do swim there, as the movie imagines. While no one knows if alien sea monsters exist in the real universe or, for that matter, any life at all beyond Earth, evidence points to a large ocean existing on Europa beneath a shell of ice, a place that could harbor life. In the 2013 sci-fi movie “Europa Report” there’s a huge creature living in an icy ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
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