Planetary Science – Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) – Free Activity Event

About EELS (Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor)

EELS is designed to go places no one has ever seen before, on its own, without real-time human input. The concept for this self-propelled, autonomous robot was inspired by the desire to descend the narrow, geyser-spewing vents in the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus in order to look for signs of life in the ocean below.

• Talk Description: Our solar system is host to many ocean worlds – moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among others, that have liquid water oceans underneath crusts of ice. These worlds may hold clues to the origin of life on Earth, and whether or not life may be unique or ubiquitous in the universe. At the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we like to dare mighty things, and we have built and tested a new robotic design capable of exploring the surfaces and icy depths of these ocean worlds. In this presentation, Dr. Morgan Cable will summarize the development of the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), culminating in a field expedition to a glacier in Canada, and discuss lessons learned along the way.
• Speaker: Dr. Morgan Cable (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
• Speaker Bio: Dr. Morgan Cable is the Science Lead for the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) concept and Acting Principal Investigator of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) Instrument aboard the Mars 2020 (Perseverance) rover. She has worked on the Cassini Mission, is a Co-Investigator of the Dragonfly mission to Titan, and is serving multiple roles on Europa Clipper. Dr. Cable’s research focuses on organic and biomarker detection, through both in situ and remote sensing techniques. She has designed receptor sites for the detection of bacterial spores, the toughest form of life, and developed novel protocols to analyze organic molecules using small, portable microfluidic sensors. Currently, Dr. Cable performs laboratory experiments to study the unique organic chemistry of Titan. She also conducts fieldwork in extreme environments on Earth, searching for life in places such as the Atacama Desert, ice fields at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, fumarole-generated ice caves of the Mount Meager Volcano in Canada, lava fields of Iceland, and cold CO₂ geysers of Green River, Utah.
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