P052-05
In Situ Field Demonstration of a Drill-instrument Combination for the Detection of Microbes and Organics in the Icy Crusts of the Ocean Worlds
Friday, 11 December 2020: 17:46
Virtual
Michael Malaska1, Rohit Bhartia2, Ken Manatt3, John C Priscu4, William Abbey3, Boleslaw Mellerowicz5, Joey Palmowski5, Gale Paulsen6, Kris Zacny7, Evan J. Eshelman8 and Juliana D'Andrilli9, (1)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States, (2)Photon Systems Inc., Covina, United States, (3)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (4)Montana State University, Land Resources and Environmental Science, Bozeman, MT, United States, (5)Honeybee Robotics, Altadena, CA, United States, (6)Honeybee Robotics Pasadena, Pasadena, CA, United States, (7)Honeybee Robotics, Pasadena, United States, (8)Impossible Sensing, St. Louis, MO, United States, (9)Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Chauvin, LA, United States
Abstract:
The warm deep ice of Enceladus, Europa, and Titan is the first habitable environment that will be encountered during deep drilling to the subsurface ocean. Data from an ice core from the Greenland ice cap have shown living microbes that exist under similar conditions to those thought to exist in the icy crusts of the Ocean Worlds (Miteva and Benchley, 2005; Miteva et al., 2009; 2015; Loveland-Kurtz et al., 2009; 2010; Knowlton et al., 2013; Vance et al., 2018). We tested a down-borehole drill-instrument combination that uses UV fluorescence to identify microbes and organics in both firn and glacial ice at Summit Station, Greenland (Malaska et al., 2020). Our drill-instrument system scanned the walls of the drilled borehole to 100 m and identified different spectral classes of organic molecules in both compacted firn and glacial ice. Microorganisms and non-cellular organic matter were concentrated in discrete spectrally-uniform spots that were roughly 1 mm across. By selectively targeting these hotspots, we gain an increase in 100x sensitivity compared to the dilution and loss of spatial information that occurs during analysis of melted ice. This instrument could useful to detect potential biosignatures in the icy crusts of the Ocean Worlds as well as further exploration of Deep Ice habitats on Earth.
This work was carried out in part at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under the NASA PSTAR program (NNH14ZDA001NPSTAR). Government sponsorship is acknowledged. Copyright 2020.
References:
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Vance et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, 123 (2018), 180–205. doi: 10.1002/2017JE005338.
