Researchers at the U.S. Southwest Research Institute (San Antonio, Texas, USA) are expanding software normally used to model electrolytes and predict corrosion and turning it into a tool that can help determine whether ice-covered worlds have appropriate conditions for microbial life.
The project is supported by the Habitable Worlds program of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which uses knowledge of Earth’s history and the life upon it as a guide for determining processes and conditions to create and maintain habitable environments.
Chemistry modeling software is often used to predict complex chemical environments at various temperatures and pressures. Dr. Florent Bocher, group leader at SwRI, has long used this type of software to understand and define corrosive conditions.
Microbial Life in Harsh Environments
In 2023, he and Dr. Charity Phillips-Lander—a senior research scientist at SwRI who currently studies organics in icy world laboratory analogs under another NASA Habitable Worlds project—began exploring if this tool could help characterize the role of harsh environments in harboring microbial life.
Because the modeling software used for corrosion studies already covers a wide range of parameters and chemistry, Phillips-Lander and Bocher found that it also has potential to model environments expected on icy moons in the solar system. Ultimately, this can help predict the conditions of another world and whether it can sustain life.
Unlike most environmental modeling software, the chemistry modeling tool accounts for the presence of organics, which are carbon-based compounds that are essential for life.
Simulating Extreme Conditions
“The question of habitability is about constraining the environmental factors that make it more likely to be friendly to life versus inhospitable,” Phillips-Lander says. “Most geochemical modeling software doesn’t account for organics at the conditions expected on ocean worlds, so I couldn’t model things that I was seeing in the lab during laboratory investigations of the conditions of ice-covered moons in our solar system, like Europa and Enceladus.”
Bocher and Phillips-Lander found that the model they created could predict the presence of pores in organics-doped ice, which is ice mixed with organic molecules. This would allow them to study how it reacts in simulations of extreme conditions from other worlds. Phillips-Lander says she observed similar pores in her laboratory work.
While preliminary results were promising, Bocher and Phillips-Lander realized that they were pushing the tool beyond its intended use. As a result, they began collaborating with Dr. Mike Rubal, a staff scientist, to improve the existing software. To support that collaboration effort, SwRI recently received a three-year, $750,000 grant from NASA’s Habitable Worlds program to enhance and broaden the software’s abilities.
Future Software Improvements
“With improvements, this tool will be able to provide a great deal of valuable information about ocean worlds,” Bocher says. “It’s one thing to know what chemical composition to expect, but it’s much more helpful to know what compounds are present, and what chemical phases they’re in.”
The researchers say they are now collaborating with a software provider to expand and improve their tools to more accurately model the conditions of other worlds like Enceladus, the ice-covered moon orbiting Saturn. This moon is thought to contain a subsurface ocean that may harbor microbial life.
“This new project will help us collect that missing data, add it to the modeling software, and then construct those models to provide greater context for laboratory investigations into these icy ocean worlds… and hopefully also what we would see during a future mission,” Phillips-Lander says.
For more information, visit SwRI’s Earth Science or Corrosion Failure Analysis web pages.
Source: SwRI, www.swri.org.