When you first learn about OWLS, it seems almost unrealistically ambitious. The work of several dozen laboratory scientists can be performed by eight automated instruments combined into a single system. These instruments can track microscopic movement in real time, analyze liquid samples, and search for the chemical fingerprints of life. It was created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a single, somewhat startling goal in mind: to examine ice fragments that were erupting from Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which is about a billion miles away from the closest repair facility. However, while traveling to the outer solar system, an intriguing event occurred. Here, in the icy, oppressive darkness of Earth’s deep oceans, the instruments designed for that mission are proving to be just as helpful.
This has a logic that, when clarified, appears to be nearly clear. The hydrothermal vent ecosystems found throughout Earth’s ocean floor are strikingly similar to the subterranean ocean of Enceladus, which is completely cut off from sunlight, sealed beneath miles of ice, and rich in chemistry. Both settings are harsh. Both are not well understood. Additionally, both require devices that can function independently in environments that would destroy the majority of conventional equipment, without constant human supervision. Building tools for ocean exploration was not JPL’s original goal. Their goal was to develop life-detection devices, and it turns out that the difference is hardly significant.
The OWLS project’s co-principal investigator, Peter Willis, put it this way: “You need the most powerful, comprehensive system imaginable when you have one shot—one chance to process a sample while the entire planet waits.” Every design choice was influenced by that pressure. The instruments needed to be self-sufficient, varied, and redundant. These same characteristics make OWLS nearly ideal for deep-sea deployment back on Earth, where oceanographers are accustomed to equipment malfunctions and communication delays.
The parallel research trajectories that are converging here are difficult to ignore. Orpheus is a robotic submersible that Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and JPL have been working on. It is intended to navigate the ocean’s hadal zones, which are the planet’s deepest and most inaccessible trenches, with little assistance from humans. There is a purpose behind the crossover. Sensor architectures from terrestrial deep-sea monitoring programs were freely appropriated by researchers studying exo-oceans, as some scientists have begun to refer to the subterranean seas of icy moons. Technologies developed in the Pacific and Atlantic are now being reimagined for environments 400 million miles away, such as autonomous underwater vehicles, passive acoustic arrays, and optoacoustic cameras.
A genuinely novel feedback loop is emerging between these two fields. The extreme miniaturization and radiation hardening required by space engineers are advantageous to deep-sea researchers. In exchange, oceanographers who have spent decades learning how to identify life in foreign chemistry provide biological detection frameworks to space mission designers. The partnership, which is still developing, is creating instruments that don’t precisely fall into either field’s traditional categories.
Whether any of this leads to the discovery that everyone is secretly hoping for—in the Mariana Trench or on Enceladus—remains to be seen. To be honest, no one knows. However, there is a feeling that the question of life beyond Earth and the question of life at Earth’s extremes have become, subtly and rather unexpectedly, the same question when one watches JPL field-test OWLS at California’s Mono Lake, a location so chemically unique it served as a stand-in for alien water. In the process, the tools designed to address one also address the other.
