NASA has selected the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to lead research into the presence of carbon on ocean worlds.
The new Investigating Ocean Worlds (InvOW) project aims to enhance our understanding of ocean worlds and possibly improve our methodology for detecting life on other planets.
According to WHOI senior scientist and InvOW principal investigator Chris German:
“If you are alive today, this is the first generation where the question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe could be answered in your lifetime. Previously, this was an abstract, intellectual, and philosophical question. We now know enough to say that it is entirely plausible that there is life out there, within humanity’s reach, and we just need to go and look.”
Discussing why finding carbon is important, he added:
“Identifying carbon compounds on ocean worlds that would provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of life is challenging. On ocean worlds, identifying valid indicators of life might be a needle-in-a-haystack kind of problem.
“Seeing through the background noise to be able to pick out signals that are definitively due to life will require rigorous examination. We need to rule out all of the other ways that signals could be generated, by non-life processes, so that they don’t otherwise confound mission scientists.”
While Tori Hoehler, director of the Center for Life Detection at NASA’s Ames Research Center added:
“With focused research, there’s a lot that can be done—a tremendous amount of groundwork that can be laid— to optimize the design and scientific yield of future missions.
“The InvOW award gives us the opportunity to do just that, by bringing together planetary scientists and Earth oceanographers to understand alien oceans the way we understand our own—as complex systems where geology, physics, chemistry, and possibly biology, work together in concert. That perspective, and our team’s ability to fluidly integrate a diversity of expertise, has been and will be at the heart of our efforts to conduct the foundational science on which future exploration will be built.”
You can check out a video below about InvOW.
