Crossovers In Ice Planet Exploration – Earth, Europa, And Beyond
Keith’s note: On 11 February 2026 NOVA PBS Host / NewsHour reporter Miles O’Brien conducted a live broadcast from a ship in the southern ocean around Antarctica where Thwaites glacier aka the “Doomsday Glacier” is melting at an alarming rate. While a team of researchers achieved a massive feat of boring through 3,000 feet of ice with a hot water drill, the mission quickly turned into a losing battle with nature. In this broadcast Miles spoke first with Peter Davis from the British Antarctic Survey and then with David Holland from New York University. At 23:55 in this video Miles asked Peter Davis an Astrobiology-related question regarding Europa, and Enceladus that I posed via the online chat.
Miles O’Brien: Keith Cowing, my space friend and good friend in general, is wondering if you have thought about how Antarctica science informs us on how to conduct astrobiology missions to Europa, Enceladus, and beyond. So … icy moons. I’ve thought about this a lot – particularly there’s there’s a project on here, Keith, involving an ice penetrating radar using long wavelength radar to to peer through the ice to see the terrain beneath which is a big part of the story as well because how rough it is, how it slopes toward the pole, where it gets smooth, how much water there is, all that all that affects the speed at which Thwaites might collapse and that very radar is going to be on the Europa mission which is doing the same mission. So there is a direct application there. But I keep thinking about space missions and the way you guys do business.
Peter Davis: 100%. And I think um I think there lots of crossovers. I think in hot water drilling um we have ‘clean drilling’, we have ‘dirty drilling’. Now that ‘dirty drilling’ is not ‘dirty’. It just means that the the water we’re using is not biologically clean. But we are we do have projects that drill into or want to drill into subglacial lakes. So these are lakes beneath thousands of meters of ice to understand if there is life living down there. what sort of kind of bacterial communities and there we have to drill cleanly. We have to ensure that the act of opening up an access hole to that lake does not introduce bacteria and viruses into that lake. So there I think there’s a lot of crossover.
Similarly to do something to Europa, whatever we do, we need to make sure it was clean. We need to make sure that we didn’t take something from Earth out to those planets and when we’re drilling through. So there’s a nice crossover there – and also, some of the technologies we use. We’ve recently worked with a kind of remotely operated vehicles that we can deploy through the bore holes. These are tethered to the surface. So they’re kind of different to the sort of things you deploy at the icefront – but they’re tethered to the surface and you kind of send them down and they can go out exploring and they’re fantastic because you can get this amazing view of what’s happening around a single bore hole.
I suspect the technology that goes into developing that sort of through bore hole instrumentation is probably very similar to the sort of technologies that we would eventually want to send to a planet like Europa – obviously scaled down because these are two or three meters in length. You want to bring them down to something space satellite size, but that’s beyond my my field. [laughter]
Miles O’Brien: But, you know, NASA, if you’re listening, this is a good place to come. I know, you know, of course, as Keith well knows, and I’ve been up there with them, that NASA does go to the Arctic quite a bit to places like Devon Island to to learn a little something about operating in extreme environments. But if you’re if you’re really thinking about icy moons and getting through thick sheets of ice, it would seem to me a mission here to try sort of sort out the problem of figuring out how to drill through – you know the I think the Europa ice sheet is many many miles thick. And you obviously you’re not going to bring hot water there. You got to figure out another way. Another way. I you know some sort of you know heated um what would you call it?
Peter Davis: Well, some sort of heated probe. some sort of probe that slowly, very, very slowly melts it way through the ice. It’s probably refreezing behind it. You’re not going to bring your data with a wire as you go. Probably is probably some sort of nuclear power, which obviously we can’t use in Antarctica, [because of the Antarctic] treaty, so yeah, there’s definitely there’s definitely technological crossovers. But I suspect what we’re doing here and what eventually will go to space, they won’t ever look the same, but you can probably trace the lineage back to the to the to the original.
Miles O’Brien: Well, you know, this is my favorite planet. We might as well learn about it. And if that helps learning about other planets, I think I think that’s all for the better. Huge amount to learn here still.
More information
Miles O’Brien Substack: https://milesobrien.substack.com/
PBS Newshour coverage: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/antarctica
