Space Research at UT: Microbes, Satellites and Deep Space Discoveries

Exploring Beneath a Planet's Surface

When NASA's Europa Clipper blasted off for its decade-long mission to explore the habitability of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, it carried a piece of UT ingenuity with it. Ice-penetrating radar technology developed by the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG), a research unit within the Jackson School, will help scientists peer beneath the moon's thick ice shell to the vast ocean miles below the surface - an ocean that, with the right combination of organic compounds and energy, could potentially sustain life.

UTIG's radar technology, pioneered by research professor Donald Blankenship, dates to the early 1990s, when researchers used it to study ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. Blankenship and his team are also collaborating with the European Space Agency and Italian Space Agency on their joint mission to explore the subsurface oceans of Europa and other Jupiter moons Ganymede and Callisto, which may also be hospitable to life.

Then there's Mars. For decades, scientists have been fascinated by the mystery of why the red planet's once-abundant rivers, lakes and oceans disappeared and, just as importantly, where all that water went. Mohammad Afzal Shadab and Eric Hiatt, who recently graduated from UT with doctoral degrees, have solved a piece of that puzzle. Using a computer model they developed, the duo estimated that water on early Mars took 50 to 200 years to seep into the planet's underground aquifers - a stark contrast to Earth, where this process takes only a few days - and rarely resurfaced. Shadab and Hiatt's findings suggest that the amount of water that sank underground could have been enough to cover the planet in at least 300 feet of water. And that water may very well still be there. This hidden reservoir could one day support future NASA explorers as they attempt to create a sustainable settlement among the stars.