CLEVELAND — If you have a question about the science behind so many of NASA's missions, Dr. Nicky Fox is the one to ask.
During a recent trip to NASA Glenn Research Center, Dr. Fox sat down with News 5 to discuss NASA's plans to build a lunar base, what it takes for humans to reach Mars, and life beyond Earth.
Watch the conversation here:
The following interview has been condensed for clarity:
News 5: What's left to learn in space?
Dr. Fox: Oh my goodness, there's so much left to learn in space because every time we send a mission to answer certain questions, we always discover things that we didn't know before. When we sent the New Horizons mission out to Pluto, you just think it's going to be a distant chunk of icy rock, and then seeing mountains and glaciers and the possible evidence of a liquid ocean, and the idea that something so far away from Earth can be alive — and then it gives you all of these other questions. Sending voyages outside our solar system into interstellar space and figuring out what's in the space between the various different pieces in our galaxy. So much still to learn.
I think for me, the big question — the one we ask ourselves every day at NASA — is there life elsewhere?
And that is one of our big things: searching for life in our solar system, beyond our solar system, in the universe.
News 5: In your gut, do you think there's a chance that in our lifetime we can find proof of other life out there?
Dr. Fox: I actually do. I think it's one of those interesting questions where you have to think about life not as we know it, but life as we don't know it.
Life on other places can look very, very different. Even if you look just at our planet and you think about the extremophiles — the things that live in those superheated vents in the oceans, things that live where there's no light, things that live where really nothing should survive, and yet life is thriving there.
I think that we will find certain signatures. We look in our own solar system — not expecting to find life now, but maybe there were the building blocks of life before.
When you try and think about how life started here on Earth, it's almost hard because we're very noisy. We've sort of imprinted on our planet, and so trying to find what those conditions were like right before life started is very difficult for us.
If we go somewhere like Mars, it's almost like a preserved time capsule of what life was like earlier in our solar system.
So, was there life on Mars billions of years ago? Are there still signatures? Are there still things that, in the right conditions, could have sparked life?
Our samples we brought back from the OSIRIS-REx mission, from the asteroid Bennu — a really old asteroid that was around when our solar system was forming — and lo and behold, we found a lot of those really key ingredients for life, like a saline sort of soup that you could mix it in.
No sign that life was on that asteroid, but a lot of clues about how these things were getting together in the early solar system.
News 5: What's it been like for you as we point our aim towards getting to Mars?
Dr. Fox: People say when you are bilingual, you dream in the other language, and people who study Mars — we dream about being on Mars. We see those images so often. You feel like you know it.
You watch where the rovers are going and the images they take and the panoramics. It's somewhere that I desperately want to go visit. For Mars scientists, that is where we would want to go.
We've seen so much of Mars, we understand so much of it, and yet there is so little that we really have been able to explore.
News 5: When we look at trying to have a permanent residence on the lunar surface and trying to get to Mars, what role does Northeast Ohio and NASA Glenn Research Center play in all of that?
Dr. Fox: There is so much going on here at the Glenn Research Center that we rely on every day. The big thing, of course, is our power systems — the nuclear power systems.
The further you get away from the sun, the harder and harder it is to use solar technology to actually power your craft, and so we routinely launch missions that have radioisotope power systems that are developed and integrated here at Glenn.
[In] 2028, we launch the Mighty Dragonfly. Dragonfly is also trying to understand how life started. It's going to Titan, a distant moon of Saturn — the location in our solar system that's probably most like Earth.
It's very counterintuitive when you think it's a moon of Saturn, and yet they have liquid on the surface, mountains and valleys, and it looks very much like desert locations here on Earth. We know there's long-chain carbon molecules — that's what you're made of — and they're just on the surface.
That's totally made possible by this radioisotope power system.
It's an octocopter, so it will land on Titan, take lots of data, and then lift and move to a different location.
Our rovers on Mars are also powered by the RPS system — those radioisotope power systems developed here.
And looking to the moon, that permanent presence, the role of fission power, the role of these radioisotopes — you want to survive the night at the moon? It's cold.
It's a long, long night.
And so as we think about surviving the night, what do we need to be able to enable that so that we can also keep our astronauts safe?
Another big thing they do here is study flammability and combustion. Gravity has an amazing effect on how flames burn, and as you want to ensure that we have safe suits and safety for our astronauts, understanding how those flames are going to change with gravity is critical.
So we study them on the ISS in microgravity — sometimes they look like sort of ball-like flames, as opposed to what you're used to.
There is gravity on the moon — it's 1/6 of the gravity we have here on Earth — and so we want to study the flammability on the ISS, on the moon and on Mars so we can really move forward in how to keep our astronauts safe. We have FM2 — the flammability of materials on the moon — and then thinking about that on Mars as well.
News 5: When people see this story at home, what do you think they should take away from it?
Dr. Fox: I think people should realize how much energy there is at NASA, and how when we say we're going to go back to the moon and we're going to stay and we're going to build a presence and then we're going to go on to Mars and we're going to do new exciting missions of science and discovery — that there is so much energy and we are doing them.
We launched the Roman Space Telescope just a few weeks ago, ahead of schedule — nine months ahead of schedule — and that team is very proud of that. Really on track to get that mission going, allowing us to really study dark energy and dark matter. When you look out at the universe, you see points of light; you see galaxies. Dark matter is the space in between — it is like the fabric of the universe — and dark energy is what powers our universe. They're kind of in a very close tussle, where dark matter wants to pull things together, and dark energy wants to force them apart. Understanding this will help us understand the evolution of our universe.
NASA is a powerhouse, and I'm delighted to be here at Glenn and celebrating the role that Ohio is playing — not just at NASA, but all of the other places that work with NASA, all the industry. It's a great time to be alive. We are having our Apollo moments.
Artemis 2, obviously incredible, but now looking forward to Artemis 3, 4, 5 as we continue to do the science, do the research, close the gaps, and then eventually send humans to Mars.
Clay LePard is the Ashtabula, Geauga and Portage counties reporter at News 5 Cleveland. Follow him on X @ClayLePard, on Facebook ClayLePardTV or email him at Clay.LePard@wews.com.
