The Search for Aliens Starts Now — in Antarctica

Joseph Miller
Sep 4, 2018 · 1 min read

It’s hard to get over putting your life’s work in harm’s way. Britney Schmidt hasn’t. The Georgia Tech researcher has tested the limits of underwater robots swimming beneath Antarctic ice shelves, a dry run for looking for life in outer space, and it hasn’t gotten any easier.

Anytime you take your whole program’s work and dangle it off of a fiber optic cable through meters of ice…it’s a little unnerving,” Schmidt tells Popular Mechanics, emailing from the Antarctic research station on the south tip of Ross Island.

This week, Schmidt and her team of researchers are leaving the Antarctic after a busy three months at the far end of the Earth. They are testing Icefin, a drone built to explore the extreme ecosystems lurking beneath thick ice. The waters beneath our planet’s ice sheet are fascinating, turning up species few people have ever laid eyes on. But they are not the final target of this chase.

Alien Seas

Icefin is meant to search for alien life — a “bug hunt,” as some scientists cheerfully call it. It is bound for the icy waters of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, possibly as soon as 2030.#

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