Where There’s Water, There’s Life

Bob Pappalardo’s drive to work used to take about 20 minutes, and ran along the quiet, winding North Foothills Highway from Boulder, Colorado to the small town of Lyons and the sandstone buildings of the University of Colorado. It was a fine commute, except when it snowed. Today, Pappalardo, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, monitors the Los Angeles traffic - “quite a sport,” he says - before heading out from his home near Santa Monica for the trek up to Pasadena; there are days, Pappalardo says, when the 25-mile drive lasts an hour and fifteen minutes.

So what got Pappalardo, a planetary geologist, and his girlfriend to leave the rambling serenity of the Eastern Rockies for the bustle of L.A.? It was a no-brainer: the search for life beyond Earth.

As study scientist for NASA’s burgeoning Europa orbiter mission, Pappalardo is working with a group of Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and engineers to deliver a plan for return to the icy moon of Jupiter, where the Galileo spacecraft, working in the late 1990s and early 2000s, recorded evidence of a vast, subsurface, saltwater ocean. Such an ocean, many scientists believe, could support the type of single-cell organisms that emerged as the first life forms on Earth. Continue reading Where There’s Water, There’s Life