Our decision to seek membership in NASA’s
Astrobiology Institute is motivated by the desire to
bring our expertise in deep subsurface ecosystems to
bear on the scientific and technological difficulties
that will be encountered during the exploration of life
beneath the surface of Mars. Our center will be a consortium
composed of 9 senior level investigators, three of which
are from DOE laboratories (PNNL, LBNL and ORNL) and
five from academic institutions (Univ. of Tennessee-UTenn,
Indiana University-IU, Univ. of Toronto-UT and Princeton
University-PU) and one from Lunar Planetary Institute.
We hope to complement the already excellent research
being performed by NAI on the Mars focus area and believe
our center’s expertise in subsurface ecosystems,
and access to unique facilities and field sites will
enable us to develop synergistic relationships with
other biological, geological and planetary research
in NAI.
Our NAI would focus upon subsurface microbial communities
that have been sequestered from the surface photosphere
for tens to hundreds of millions of years and the environments
that support their in situ activities. These terran
ecosystems would represent the closest analogy to what
might exist beneath the cryosphere of Mars. We seek
to characterize the microbial, mineralogical and geochemical
interactions, the isotopic signatures of the organic
and inorganic gaseous, aqueous and metallic species,
the interspecies and interkingdom communications and
interactions, the genomic diversity and capabilities,
the proteins expressed and their origin and the metabolites
created and exchanged. This information will be used
to design life detection approaches that will be tested
in well-characterized field locations as a first step
towards the design of flight-capable life detection
instruments for future Mars drilling missions.
The proposed research will address five
of the seven goals outlined in the Astrobiology Roadmap
(http://astrobiology.arc.nasa.gov/roadmap/).
The study of deep subsurface, ecosystems in ancient
groundwater is directly relevant to the exploration
for extant life in the subsurface of Mars, Objective
2.1 of Goal 2-Life in Our Solar System. In geological
terranes where thermal overprinting has eradicated microbial
life and which have remained isolated from the surface
since that thermal episode, our investigations will
determine the type of prebiotic compounds that can be
formed in the subsurface and whether life itself could
have been spawned beneath the planet’s surface.
Hence our proposed research touches upon aspects of
Goal 3-Origins of Life. Because we have accessed our
deep subsurface ecosystems by way of the deep Au mines
of South Africa, characterization of the geochemical,
lipid and isotopic signatures preserved in these rocks
will enable us to answer some of the questions raised
in Goal 4-Earth’s Early Biosphere and its Environment.
We will explore the evolution, environment and limit
of life, Goal 5, by examining the community composition
of subsurface ecosystems in different geochemical venues
and by performing in situ experiments to see how the
community evolves in response to environmental changes.
Our research is particularly relevant to Objective 5.3,
the determination of survival strategies that permit
organisms to maintain viability in a radioactive environment
for millennia. Finally, our research is already identifying
isotopic signatures that indicate the presence of subsurface
life, Objective 7.1 of Goal 7-Signature of Life, and
our research plans will determine whether these signatures
are preserved in the rocks.
Education and Public Outreach (EPO) activities
in IPTAI are designed around three areas of emphasis.
First: educational workshops for undergraduates and
high school teachers where participants actively collect
and interpret data from laboratory and field experiments.
Second: public outreach through a web site with premiere-quality
digital media including animations and video that illustrate
how and why scientists conduct research in deep mines.
Third: mentoring undergraduate and graduate research
at Indiana, Princeton, and Tennessee universities. These
astrobiology students will work with faculty to design
a series of web-based quantitative and investigative
activities for all pre-college students but highlighting
the diverse careers of leading women on the IPTAI team.
Inclusion of collaborators from the School
of Fine Arts, IU Instructional Support Services, and
University Information Technology Services at Indiana
University is an unusual aspect of this proposal. High-resolution
digital video/audio materials will be collected during
field experiments and will be use in both research and
educational components of the IPTAI. Videos produced
by scientists will document research methods in a substantially
different way from conventional commercial films. We
hope to capture examples of both set-backs and advances
in research resulting from unanticipated and challenging
conditions in deep mines. Given severe time and access
constraints in deep mines, digital documentation of
the physical conditions and the configuration of instruments
are essential for interpretation of experimental results.
See Team Research Plan |