Word to the wise: If you’re invited over to a place called the Ice Physical Properties Laboratory for drinks, don’t get your own ice.
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Post-doctoral researcher Mathieu Choukroun prepares an ice sample for study. The ice lab has special equipment and techniques for creating and working with ice. ( NASA/JPL).
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That’s where scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are endeavoring to recreate the kinds of ice that have been discovered on frozen moons like Titan and Europa, according to an article posted Tuesday on the JPL web site.
Take, for example, Titan. Surface temperature? Oh, about minus 290 degrees. “Cryovolcanoes” belching a cocktail of “super-chilled liquids” onto the surface. The possibility of rich organic chemicals that might be “possible precursors to life.” To learn more about all this, JPL scientists are working to reproduce the kind of ice that would be found on that satellite of Saturn.
“We’re trying to shed light on processes that have occurred in the evolution of these bodies and understand what is happening on them now,” JPL planetary scientist Julie Castillo said in the article.
Sometimes it’s the elements that go into the ices — such as ammonia or various salts — that the scientists are looking to replicate. But there are also different types of ice, like “clathrate hydrates, water ices that form at low temperature and under high pressure and have molecules of different gases locked inside their ice crystals,” the article reports.
The goal of such experiments? Not to develop new novelty ices to flavor drinks down at the local bar, that’s for sure. Rather, it’s the continuing search for insight into where life might be found in our solar system and galaxy.
“Ice is found nearly everywhere in the universe and comes in many forms,” Castillo says in the article. “Where there is ice, there is often water, and where there is water, there is the possibility of life.”