The best place to learn how to identify extra-terrestrial organisms may not be in space, but beneath the Earth's oceans.
Scientific expeditions to deep volcanic vents along the mid-Atlantic Ocean floor could serve as a primer to the types of microorganisms that could lurk beneath the surface of the Jovian moon Europa - long thought to harbor its own ocean beneath an icy crust. The Arlington, Va.-based company Space Adventures has begun offering trips to such vents near the Azores island chain in a joint effort with the Russian research vessel Akademik Keldysh. The Akademik holds a pair of submersibles capable of reaching depths of 20,000 feet (6,090 meters) to make the dives.
"It's no doubt that the things we're going to learn here are applicable for the search for microbial life on other planets," said recent diver and former astronaut Owen Garriot, an alum of NASA's Skylab and Space Shuttle missions. "The people at NASA are very interested in looking for life on the other planets of the Solar System."
Space Adventures is working with the P.P Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow and Deep Ocean Expeditions to organize dives down to the Rainbow Vents, located 280 miles (450 kilometers) southwest of the Azores and 7,875 feet (2,4000 meters) below the ocean surface. The Rainbow Vents are a field of tall hydrothermal geysers heated by volcanic activity and spewing superheated water. Some reach 30 feet (10 meters) in height and produce "black smokers" as minerals flowing through the vents cool in the surrounding ocean water.
Garriot told SPACE.com that researchers studying the vents are chiefly interested in organisms called extremophiles that live by chemosynthesis, a process that uses chemical reactions instead of sunlight to generate energy. Microorganisms along the undersea vents survive on methane, hydrogen sulfide or other chemicals bubbling from the hot vents, then serve as a food source for a myriad of crabs, shrimp and other lifeforms in the area.
"These same types of vents have been suggested for the seafloor of Europa," said Frank Carsey, a research scientist specializing in ice for Earth, Mars and Europa at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "If those vents are there, then the sea pressures may even be the same, so we would expect that some of the life strategies would be the same as they are at Earth's vents."
Studying environments like the Rainbow Vents system helps researchers determine what problems they face with probes on other worlds, Carsey told SPACE.com. "But we're not yet at a place where we can say that by looking at Earth you can learn something about Europa."
Earth's own hydrothermal vents, and the biological and ecological process around them are themselves not fully understood, and were only discovered about 25 years ago, said Space Adventures chairman Mike McDowell during a telephone interview.
"This ecosystem is totally strange," he said. "With these pumping black smokers and all these animals clinging to life in an environment where it's extremely hot and totally independent of sunlight, it sends a chill up my spine."
McDowell, who also leads the Space Adventures deep sea vent expeditions, said he's hoping to offer similar dives in the Pacific Ocean, where vents were originally discovered a quarter century ago. The diversity of creatures there, he added, is vastly different from those found along Atlantic Ocean vents.
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