Goodman wins NASA grant to explore icy moons

The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) has awarded Assistant Professor of Physics Jason Goodman a five-year grant to investigate the flows of ice-covered oceans on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons) and other moons in the outer solar system. His work ultimately aims to help determine whether life could exist elsewhere in the solar system, and to guide geologists and other scientists investigating the surface features of these icy worlds.

"The overall thrust of this research is to get at some really fundamental issues about the limits of life. Is life limited to Earth? Is there a possibility that it could be elsewhere? If so, maybe these ice-covered oceans are one of the best places to look for it," said Goodman, whose research focuses broadly on fluid mechanics of atmospheres, oceans and ice.

The NASA award is part of a larger five-year grant given to a newly selected NAI team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The grant amount to Wheaton for the first year is $30,000. Goodman will be working in collaboration with Steve Vance, a planetary geophysicist at JPL.

Wheaton Associate Professor of Geology Geoff Collins, who has been researching Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, is co-investigator on the project. Wheaton students will be hired to work with Goodman in performing computer and laboratory simulations of the flow of heat and currents in the oceans of these distant worlds.

The NAI-JPL team consists of 47 researchers and education specialists representing 21 institutions. The team includes 17 universities, two non-profit research organizations, and two NASA centers spanning 11 states and four countries, according to Isik Kanik, NAI-JPL team leader. The team will research various aspects of the icy worlds of the outer planets--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

"These planets have a number of moons that are basically big balls of ice. It has become clear over the years that many of these balls may actually have liquid water underneath their surfaces," said Goodman. "That makes them really the only places in the universe in the solar system besides the Earth that have clearly substantial amounts of liquid water readily available. And since as far as we can tell liquid water is a prerequisite for life on Earth if you are interested in life elsewhere, these would be the places to check out."

Europa is one of the moons with the most obvious evidence of liquid water under its icy crust, he said. "There have been a lot of questions about the source of the heat that seems to be keeping the water layer liquid instead of freezing. And a lot of planetary geologists interested in the surface have been making descriptions about certain features on the surface-weird chunks of ice and evidence of it moving and breaking apart. The belief is that some sort of heating from the liquid below caused the ice to do that. But if you are going to make that kind of argument, you really need to know something about how the water is moving and transferring heat. Up until this point, really nobody had made a serious effort to understand that."

Over the years the professor, who calls his work planetary oceanography, has written about the flows of water beneath these icy worlds. Now, using a combination of laboratory, computational and theoretical approaches, he will investigate circulation within Europa's sub-ice ocean.

"The basic problem is that nobody has ever seen this ocean, nobody has ever taken a cup of water out of it. It's under several kilometers of a thick layer of ice," he said. "So it's really tough to get any real data about it. So in the absence of actually being able to measure things, we are working from first principles and trying to predict what we think it will be like and how it is likely to flow."

(Photo of Europa: courtesy of NASA/JPL)