image: SwRI researchers are expanding corrosion modeling software to predict if icy worlds such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus may be able to harbor microbial life. In this cross-polarized light microscope image, pores are visible in glycine-doped ice formed in a laboratory investigation of Enceladus’ subsurface conditions. These pores could form habitable niches for microbial life.
Credit: Southwest Research Institute/Charity Phillips-Lander
SAN ANTONIO — November 18, 2024 —Southwest Research Institute is working to expand software normally used to model electrolytes and predict corrosion and turn it into a tool that can help determine whether ice-covered worlds have the right conditions for microbial life. The project is supported by NASA’s Habitable Worlds program, which seeks to use knowledge of the history of the Earth and the life upon it as a guide for determining the processes and conditions that create and maintain habitable environments.
Chemistry modeling software is often used to predict complex chemical environments at various temperatures and pressures. SwRI Group Leader Dr. Florent Bocher has long used this type of software to understand and define corrosive conditions. In 2023, he and SwRI Senior Research Scientist Dr. Charity Phillips-Lander, 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 had the potential to model the environments expected on icy moons in the solar system, and ultimately help predict the conditions of another world that could 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.
“The question of habitability is about constraining the environmental factors that make it more likely to be friendly to life versus inhospitable,” Phillips-Lander said. “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 to study how it reacts in simulations of extreme conditions on other worlds. Phillips-Lander had observed similar pores in her laboratory work.
While these preliminary results were promising, Bocher and Phillips-Lander realized that they were pushing the tool beyond its intended use. They began collaborating with SwRI Staff Scientist Dr. Mike Rubal to improve the existing software, and earlier this year SwRI received a three-year, $750,000 grant from NASA’s Habitable Worlds program in support of their work to enhance and broaden the software’s abilities.
“With improvements, this tool will be able to provide a great deal of valuable information about ocean worlds,” Bocher said. “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 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, which 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 said.
For more information, visit https://www.swri.org/industries/earth-science or https://www.swri.org/corrosion-influenced-failure-analysis.