Dara JPL Visit 1

While everything we saw at JPL was undeniably cool, I was completely enthralled by the fact that most people there are confident there is alien life in the universe. While this alien life may not be the green Martians we hoped they would be, the possibility of single-cell organisms existing on Mars at some point is insane. Primarily, I was interested in the way JPL goes about their life-finding expeditions. The first step is not to touch down and start hunting around. The primary goal in the beginning stages is to establish that the planet (in this case, Mars) could have been habitable at one point in time. Scientists narrowed down the one thing that all earth-life requires to live: liquid water. Based on this deduction, JPL missions have been searching for evidence of water on planets in our solar system. So far, we can tell that Mars once had water flowing through it by the smooth pebbles (forged by a stream) and the presence of ice underneath the dirt. If life did exist there, it would have been three billion years ago which raises questions about what types of organisms existed at that time and on another planet. 
The space object that particularly caught my attention was Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Europa is also an ocean planet encapsulated in ice. Since Jupiter is so far from the sun, there is not enough heat on Europa to unfreeze the shell. Europa’s water is the three times the size of all the earth’s oceans combined. It seems to the JPL team that Europa is going to be an incredible discovery of non-earth life. I was especially excited when we bounced around the term “space sea-monsters”. Though I know the most probable discoveries of life anywhere in space will be invisible to the naked eye, it’s nice to imagine a Loch Ness monster-type creature swimming around in Jupiter’s moon. It just emphasizes the fact that there is so much we don’t know about our own planet, let alone the solar system. 
I did not think I would ever have a favorite space mission, but the Cassini mission around Saturn excited me. Probably the most iconic looking planet besides our own, Saturn boasts rings of rock and ice. Cassini was able to take incredible photographs of Saturn, its rings, and its moons. When I really thought about the gravity (pun intended) of viewing an image taken lightyears away, I was in complete awe. How did we, as a human race, even figure this out? How do cameras even work in space? I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t even ask all the questions that eventually settled in my mind after the trip. 

A final note of the trip that impacted me: the lightyear. In my elementary knowledge of space, I can acknowledge that planets are far from each other, and I know of the concept of a lightyear. However, it just did not occur to me how long a mission would need to take to get to another planet. When discussing the Mars 2020 Rover launching in July, my mind said “the rover will leave Earth and land on Mars in July”. However, when told the projected landing date would not be until February 2021, I launched myself into another existential crisis. How are we gaining such intimate knowledge of things that are legitimately a time distance from us? How do we control a robot that is seven months away from us? Thinking about time and distance as linear but separate, this concept of spacetime is dumbfounding to me. I cannot wait for the next trip to JPL-- hopefully, I can be a bit more collected and ask more questions. Today felt like a dream. It is so unbelievable that all of that space just exists outside of our little world! While it helps to put things in perspective, it also makes me question my significance as an organism. Overall, an existential experience.

PS: instead of posting 5 images, I am linking the NASA website's archive of images from Cassini. Each photo has an explanation so I'd rather share form the source than butcher it! https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/all/?order=pub_date+desc&per_page=50&page=0&search=&fs=&fc=&ft=cassini&dp=&category= 

Additionally, I found this video from JPL documenting Cassini's lat images of Saturn before being sucked into the atmosphere and burning up. I got chills while watching. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5ZrSKpbdSg

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