Aliens of the Deep - crew members

Pan Conrad, Astrobiologist

Job: Senior scientist for the Jet Propulsion Lab's astrobiology research

Her mission is to figure out ways to look for life on other planets. To do this, she learns about the chemical clues life leaves on Earth through time and tries to figure out how well these clues survive under various environmental conditions. These clues help her decode which features of life on Earth might be universal to life on other planets and how we might look for those features throughout the galaxy. Pan's favorite place to look for the evidence of life is inside rocks and sediment (including ice)-especially as she seeks out evidence that shows how living things adapt to changing environments. Pan is presently engaged in a three-year field campaign to make measurements of chemical biosignatures with non-contact (short-range remote sensing) instruments intended to detect subtle chemical signatures of microbial life that dwells on and in rocks and sediment. This field campaign has her running between the Arctic and the Antarctic. Ever since working with the "Aliens of the Deep" project, Pan can't wait to get back to the seafloor, which she considers one of the coolest places ever. The success with McDUVE (her research instrument highlighted in the film) on the MIR submersibles has inspired Pan to see what more she can learn about hydrothermal vents that might be relevant to solar system exploration.
  
Pan (short for Pamela) Conrad is an astrobiologist who works for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which is run by the California Institute of Technology for NASA. "The sea floor is a very different exploration environment than the ones we're accustomed to at JPL," she says. "But when somebody offers you a chance to jump into a submarine and go to the hydrothermal vents, you can't say no."

For the scientists, the deep-sea dives were a great opportunity to get out of the lab and into the field. Though Conrad's work-designing and building her "life detection" instrument-was completed before she joined the expedition, the astrobiologist relished the opportunity to dive and see the results of her hard work in action (even though, at times, she seemed like a nervous parent). "I dove three times and took our fancy-dancy optical instrument to the bottom of the sea. I bit my fingernails and hoped it didn't blow up, explode, implode, or do otherwise unsavory things," Conrad laughs.

"Every time NASA sends a spacecraft to some solar system destination, there's a camera on board," says Conrad. "As a child, I remember seeing those images and just being floored. I'm living proof that those images were meaningful; I'm here, doing science. I'm living the dream that got started by images of a guy walking on the surface of the moon."

According to the NASA Astrobiology Institute, astrobiologists seek to answer several important questions about the possibility of extraterrestrial life: How do habitable worlds form and how do they evolve? How did living systems emerge? How can we recognize other biospheres? How have the geophysical nature of the Earth and its biosphere influenced each other over time? Conrad gives some insight into how she and her colleagues might go about answering these questions: "When you think about how you might look for life on another planet, you have to first design tools that could tell you if what you're looking at is actually life. So, we've been working on a tool at JPL which might give you a clue that you're looking at life without having to touch it, so that you don't contaminate it if it actually is life."

With this in mind, Conrad, working with JPL's Arthur Lonne Lane, designed, tested, and built an instrument specifically for these dives that would test this concept. "We built an instrument that uses light to tickle the molecules that are part of the material they're probing, and those molecules will tell you what they are-if you use a laser light to illuminate organic material, certain molecules in that material will glow with a very specific color, and that color tells you which molecules are present. It's also got a camera, so we can see what's happening in real time-we know exactly what we're looking at."