The science that we are looking at is geared at looking at hydrothermal systems on Earth
as a means to explore or understand hydrothermal or other similar water-rock interactions on other systems in our Solar System.
As you change the geology and the chemistry of these systems,
then the microbiology at the base of the food chain of these systems changes as well.
And so where that's taken us some new departure into this space research is really evolved only over the last two or three years.
I'm Chris German from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and I'm going to be the science lead on our SUBSEA project exploration of Lō`ihi Seamount.
I'm Darlene Lim and I'm at the NASA Ames Research Center as well as the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute, and I'm the principal investigator of the SUBSEA Research Program.
So in the last 20 years or so, NASA programs like the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the just-completed Cassini mission to Saturn,
we've realized that there's moons of large planets of the Solar System that also have liquid water oceans.
In their case, they're covered with ice cap, but underneath that ice cap, there are deep saltwater oceans,
and in at least two cases, those saltwater oceans are in contact with a rocky seafloor.
So in our circumstance, we're actually looking at an inter-plate seamount that, in the first year, in 2018, we're headed to Lō`ihi.
And this seamount is really exciting to us because it's not the kind of traditional exploration data point,
it's a means, if you will, of not only ground truthing what we think we know, but also as a means to prepare ourselves for what we want to learn in the future,
and actually impact future missions to other ocean systems in our Solar System.
Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, the moon is so tiny that although the ocean is five or more kilometers deep, so really deep, even by Earth's standards,
the pressures at the bottom are really just the same as a few hundred meters deep on Earth.
So Lō`ihi Seamount, which rises up to shallow water depths, is a really cool place to go and study for that purpose.
So it's a really cool time to be working in this area, that suddenly we realize that everything we've been doing with things like the Nautilus,
learning how to use robots and go and explore the seafloor,
is exactly the planning mission that NASA would have wanted someone to have been investing in in the last 50 years so they could now know how they could go and do that in the outer Solar System in the future.
The architecture when it comes to telepresence is a wonderful model for future mission architectures when it comes to human space flight to deep space or to Mars.
And so we're going to use all of these different sort of terrestrial means to learn about future opportunities when it comes to
getting ourselves into a position to do robotic exploration on other planets or else human exploration on other planets as well.