New horizons in the search for life in the universe

PASADENA, Calif. - The search for life beyond Earth begins in Left Field.

This room on the hilly southern California campus of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory got its name because, well, crazy ideas come out of left field. A white board covers one long wall, from floor to ceiling. Like mad scientists armed with dry-erase markers, NASA's smartest spacecraft wizards gather to brainstorm.

One of them, Adam Steltzner, stood before the white board in early May talking about landing a spacecraft on Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. It sounded like a fool's errand.

But to answer an essential question of humanity - are we alone? - NASA will have to venture to distant, exotic worlds. The agency's chief scientist, Ellen Stofan, said in April NASA is ready to do just that. "I think we're going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth within a decade," she said. Definitive evidence will come in 20 to 30 years.

There were plenty of people in Left Field on a day in early May. NASA's top planetary scientist, Jim Green, had traveled from headquarters in Washington D.C. The lab's director, Charles Elachi, and most of its top planetary scientists and engineers also attended.

But Steltzner was really speaking directly to just one man - John Culberson. He's chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that writes the House bill to fund NASA. He could make dreams into a reality. And he was all-in.

"We're going to Europa," Culberson said. "And we're going to land."

The possibility of life elsewhere has captivated NASA from the beginning. In the 1960s some doctors thought microbes might live on the moon, and Apollo astronauts were held in quarantine upon returning to Earth. Eventually scientists declared the moon, and all the planets in the solar system except for Mars, to be lifeless. Even with Mars most scientists believe that, although life may once have existed, it probably doesn't now.

So scientists are looking further out to the moons of the outer solar system, like Europa, where amazing worlds with subsurface oceans await. Some of them, such as Saturn's moon Enceladus, are even spouting geysers of water into space.

To date spacecraft built by NASA and the European space agency have only whizzed by these moons as they examined Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune, offering glimpses of their secrets.

The next step is to put spacecraft into orbit around, and possibly to land on, one or more of them. Perhaps one day, in a cross between Buck Rogers and Jacques Cousteau, a probe might even drill through the ice sheets and release submersibles into the oceans below.

That's long been the dream of planetary scientists like Kevin Hand, who grew up beneath a dark sky in Vermont. As his 10-year-old self gazed upward, seeing countless stars and the bright swath of the Milky Way Galaxy, Hand wondered whether humans are alone in the Universe.

As a senior scientist at the California lab, he still does.

Now, finally, NASA has the know-how and technology to go, and Europa tops their list.

What scientists know about the moon comes from NASA's Galileo probe, which launched in 1989 to explore the Jupiter system. At the time scientists were planning the mission Apple had yet to introduce the Macintosh line. Galileo recorded its data on magnetic tape.

Still that rudimentary data fired the minds of young scientists like Hand, who found in Europa a possible cradle of life. The gravity exerted by Jupiter pushes and pulls on the moon, creating friction and providing a source of interior heat.

This means Europa harbors vast oceans beneath its ice sheets, more water than exists on Earth. The average depth of the Pacific Ocean is about 2 miles. On Europa the oceans are up to 60 miles deep. At the inky bottom of Earth's oceans, near volcanically active areas, life teems around hydrothermal vents. Scientists believe similar features line the bottom of Europa's ocean.

But in recent years NASA hasn't asked for funding to go to Europa. With Mars squarely in its cross hairs, the agency already had enough planetary exploration programs on its plate, its administrators said. Europa and the other interesting moons would have to wait.

Culberson's planetary vision

Then, in the conservative Culberson, the planetary scientists found their champion. He yearns to reveal God's creation - life - elsewhere.

"Life will be everywhere," Culberson often says. "I believe the good Lord seeded the entire universe."

Culberson added $43 million and $80 million to NASA's 2013 and 2014 budgets, respectively, expressly for a Europa mission. Last summer, after NASA requested $15 million for the 2015 budget, Culberson upped the total to $100 million.

Now, in May, he had come to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to see how those planning funds had been put to use.

Culberson's two-day visit was not a conventional VIP tour, showcasing the bells and whistles. His was meat and potatoes, numbers and technical details.

But he was still very much a VIP. Here at the California lab, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the Congressman wasn't called Mr. Culberson, or John, but rather "Mr. Chairman."

Mr. Chairman pays the bills. And for Mr. Chairman the highlight of his visit came in Left Field, where Hand, Steltzner and other scientists and engineers spent a few hours going over the fine details of the Europa spacecraft and a possible lander.

Initially, the scientists had considered an orbiting mission to repeatedly fly by the moon, called the Europa Clipper, at a cost of about $2 billion. But Culberson encouraged NASA to be more bold, and consider adding a lander to deliver much more information about the world.

To land on Europa a measure of boldness is required.

The world literally creaks as it is so close to Jupiter the mighty planet's tidal forces cause Europa's surface to rise and fall as much as 100 feet every three days. The surface of this "nightmare glacier" is streaked with crevasses. Lethal radiation from Jupiter bathes its surface.

Standing before the white board in Left Field, Steltzner confidently explained how it can be done. He doesn't have the look of your typical rocket scientist. He's wearing jeans with cuffs rolled up at the ankles over dark boots. His jet black hair has a wave on top and is slicked back at the sides. He wanted to be a rock and roller in his younger days, and his 1950s look calls to mind the Fonz, not an engineer discussing the intricacies of landing on an ice-encrusted world 400 million miles away.

Only his T-shirt offers an inkling of Steltzner's day job. It reads, "Dare Mighty Things." And that's just what he's done. Steltzner was the architect of the seven minutes of terror as lead designer of the daring lander that safely carried the Curiosity rover to the surface of Mars in 2012.

For an additional $1 billion the mission could take with it a 650-pound lander, the scientists explained. Using NASA's powerful, under-development Space Launch System rocket, the spacecraft and its lander could launch in 2022 and get to Europa in just under five years.

Once it nears Europa the spacecraft would be traveling at a speed of about 10,000 mph. To reach the surface safely, the lander must slow to less than 5 mph, and Europa has no atmosphere to help. So the lander will need to bring its own rocket, and a lot of fuel, to slow down.

Back in 1969 the Apollo lander had Neil Armstrong on board to guide the spacecraft to the surface of the moon amid a boulder field. For the Europa mission, with an hour-long delay in communication, NASA will need to develop an autonomous lander to find a safe place to set down.

But after learning from Curiosity, NASA is up to the challenge, says Steltzner.

As part of their presentation the scientists discussed less expensive alternatives to the soft lander, but with a reduced capacity to study Europa's surface. Most involved slamming into the moon.

After they were done, all eyes fell upon Culberson, who sat in the center of a crescent couch. Before him the long wall of white-boards were covered by various drawings and calculations of the lander, rockets and Europa. During the technical discussion he had asked questions - "Where's the magnetometer? You've got to have a magnetometer." - and taken detailed notes on graph paper.

"Why go all that way if you're not going to answer the most important question?" he said.

He wanted a "soft" lander with a microscope, the ability to take samples and scientific tools to assess what the lander scooped up. Short of burrowing through the ice and reaching the ocean - which can't be done until a mission assesses the depth of Europa's ice crust - this kind of lander offered the best chance of finding life.

Strategy at the scientific briefings

Culberson's obsession with Europa has heartened the planetary science community, and he counts science luminaries such as Bill Nye, chief executive of The Planetary Society, among his allies. But there is also a concern that Culberson's laser focus on Europa could exclude other promising targets, like Titan and Enceladus, both moons of Saturn.

During the briefings the scientists in California were careful to talk up these other worlds as well, and the strategy appeared to work.

Culberson had brought along a friend, Robert Ballard, the famed oceanographer who found the wreck of the Titanic and has developed cutting edge technology to explore the depths of oceans on Earth.

Culberson believes Ballard can help NASA develop a submersible to explore the oceans of Europa. This is a monumental task because somehow a probe must melt through miles of ice, and then face unknown icebergs and other hazards below. But Culberson believes NASA should fly a follow-up mission to the lander, with a submersible, in the 2030s.

Ballard does too. However, during the course of the briefings he became intrigued by the other worlds, especially Titan, around Saturn.

It's big, about 50 percent larger than Earth's moon, bigger than Mercury. Titan has a rocky core in its interior, surrounded by oceans, then a crust of ice. The surface is extremely cold, -290 degrees Fahrenheit.

Even at those temperatures hydrocarbons like methane and ethane can exist as liquids, and they do, forming lakes as deep as 500 feet, rivers and deltas. Titan also has an atmosphere that's denser than Earth's. Methane rains down on its surface. What life could exist under such conditions? Something completely new.

Ballard was won over.

"Well, you've got to go there," he said at one point.

Until now NASA's search for life has almost exclusively focused on Mars with more than a dozen missions. This is partly because it's the world most similar to Earth, close enough to the Sun that water ran over its surface billions of years ago. Life as we know it could have thrived there.

But the biggest reason NASA has explored Mars so thoroughly is its proximity to Earth. Using smaller, conventional rockets, spacecraft can reach Mars in about nine months.

With the bigger rocket NASA is building the outer worlds are within reach, and Culberson is prodding the agency to do so.

Putting NASA chief on the spot

A deep-red Republican, Culberson is not well loved by NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden, who was appointed by President Barack Obama.

Toward the end of the meetings in California Culberson put Green, the NASA official who oversees planetary science for Bolden, on the spot.

Green noted the $30 million requested by Bolden and the president for the 2016 budget wouldn't allow the project to proceed fast enough to accommodate a lander.

"The budget for what the administration gave us is not ..." Green said, before being cut off.

"Ignore that," Culberson said. "Just ignore that. Pay no attention to it."

"I'm going to," Green said. "But there are other groups in the administration that I have to interface with that make it quite the challenge."

Culberson shot right back with, "I need to know where there's a problem because then I'll just go write it into the statute."

Two weeks after his visit to California, Culberson returned to the Capitol in Washington D.C. He had written the statutes.

Culberson had increased NASA's Europa budget to $140 million, from the president's $30 million request. The law called for a 2022 launch and a "surface element."

The budget also created a brand new Ocean Worlds Exploration Program, and provided a few tens of millions of dollars to begin planning missions beyond Europa.

Culberson doesn't have the final say, of course. But who will stop him?

His budget will clear the House. Over in the Senate the analogous Appropriations subcommittee is chaired by Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama.

Shelby is a champion of the Space Launch System rocket NASA is building because engineers in his state are designing it. The expensive rocket won't have many human missions to fly in the 2020s, so it needs other payloads to fill out its launch schedule. With multiple robotic probes to the ocean worlds, Culberson has them.

It's also hard to see President Barack Obama, who is pro-science, opposing a budget designed to do more science.

All of which means that what Mr. Chairman wants for planetary exploration, Mr. Chairman is probably going to get.

As Steltzner, the rocker-turned-rocket scientist, took in the scene in Left Field he marveled at how quickly things are changing. For more than a decade, since the Galileo flight, planetary scientists have yearned to explore the exotic worlds beyond the asteroid belt.

It's like playing tug of war, he said. You're pulling and pulling on the rope for what seems like years. Then, all of sudden, the other guy is running toward you.