"One new area JPL is very interested in are these ocean worlds, ice-covered worlds. Places like Enceladus, with a huge ocean under its ice cap. Titan with its methane lakes. Europa has more ocean water than Earth. And beyond the solar system, JPL is taking a strong role in discovering new Earths, exoplanets in the habitable zone, with water and oxygen. NASA has an office of planetary protection that develops guidelines for [protecting those places when we get to them]. We take that very seriously, and it's becoming a really big challenge. You have to clean the instruments, the sampling arms. If you want to take a sample of fresh water, the whole system has to be very, very clean. Everything that sample touches has to be cleaned, isolated, and sterilized. Meanwhile, the electronics on the spacecraft have to still function. It's all a challenging cycle, getting clean, staying clean, testing how clean you are, and still having a functional spacecraft."
JPL’s New Director on Life Beyond Earth
Michael Watkins discusses the potential for finding alien life, and how to protect it if we do.
(NASA/ESA,/J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute), and the Hubble Comet ISON Imaging Science Team)
