17 January 1997: NASA's Europa Press Conference
©Copyright 1997 Keith Cowing, The Astrobiology Web, Reston Communications

I walked into this press conference at NASA Headquarters with several well-practiced preconceptions of what might be revealed - preconceptions which had been rattling around my head since 1981. You see, I had managed to find myself in the Von Karman Auditorium at JPL during the Voyager 2 encounter with Saturn. It was almost midnight, and we were all waiting for a confirmation signal that would let us know that the spacecraft had made a successful ring plane crossing. Since nothing was going to happen for a while, we watched TV. The late Jules Bergman (ABC) tried in vain to get the monitors switched away from "Nightline" - a few minutes past the start of the show they showed clips of Bergman as a cub reporter in the early 60's complete with a buzz cut ala Alan Shepard. I'd have been embarrased too.

After the Bergman hairdoo frenzy died down, I can clearly remember overhearing a JPL scientist commenting on the structure of ice moons of the outer solar system, the surface of Europa, and the "wild idea' as he put it that some of his colleagues had that there might be an ocean under that ice.

This all resurfaced again a year or so later, reading Arthur C. Clarke's "2010: Odyssey Two" and then again in 1984 when the movie version of the book came out. Both incarnations of the story - and their speculations regarding Europan lifeforms further anchored the idea in my mind that life on/under Europa is something that is very, very "possible".

Walking into NASA Headquarters today, I replayed the scene from the movie version of "2010" over and over in my head. If you are familiar with the film, you will recall that the crew of the decided to send a remotely controlled probe down to Europa as they passed by to check out some curious readings they had received - ones possibly indicative of life. In this scene, Heywood Floyd reacts to information being called out by his Russian crewmates as they control the probe's descent and low level swoop over Europa and monitor the realtime data return:

Floyd: "Oxygen. Carbon."

Russian: "Chlorophyll ... CHLOROPHYLL!"

Floyd: "Chlorophyll -- jeez! Is it organic?"

Russian: "I think so. I will bring the probe lower".

Floyd: "It's down in that crater . There -- THERE".

Fast Forward: Europa 1997

Reality. The Europa probe du jour was also remotely controlled albeit from hundreds of millions of miles away. And there weren't any Russian accents. Yet, just as was the case in the movie, the first people to analyze the Galileo data from Europa, were all practicing what has come to be known as "instant science". This is an intellectual exercise unique to both the television age and the space age. In these situations, scientists speculate on what they might be seeing, sometimes stumbling in their descriptions over necessary 'maybes' and 'not sure what we're seeing', sometimes done in realtime, as data is received from a spacecraft. In many cases, the scientists on the dais today would often refer, somewhat breathlessly, to the photos being unveiled, as having "only been on the ground" for a day or so.

I grabbed a copy of the press kit and the press release and wham the phrase "ice volcanoes on Europa" jumped out at me. Whoa, they're not mincing words. Such a statement made by traditionally conservative scientists after only glimpsing preliminary data points to some rather obvious evidence. This should be fun.

A few minutes later, the NASA HQ TV technician did a practice run through of all of the imagery that would be used for the briefing. Multiple monitors showed the preview. The title page for the briefing appeared: "Europa Unveiled". Gee what a flattering coincidence: my Europa Website, entitled "Europa Revealed" had been online for 6 months .... NASA Public Affairs claims that this is indeed a coincidence. Oh well. I'm still flattered. I just happened to pick virtually the same title for my website as was eventually used, months later, for the press conference where the first concrete evidence was presented of a watery iceworld that might harbor life.

As the black and white images started to flash silently on the screen I made offhand comment that this looked very much like the intersecting highways in suburban Virginia. This elicited a few chuckles. Several of us were soon pointing out specific roads. Funny thing, the more I looked at the image, overlaying my inspection with my preconceived mental map of the jungle of Virginia roadways, I started to actually "find" things that fit in with the notion - including something shaped like the Pentagon building and Dulles International Airport. I even thought I saw a large black monolith. This reminded me of fossil hunting. You walk around looking at nothing for some time and then WHAMO - you find one fossil, your brain loads the search and pattern recognition algorithm, and suddenly, there are fossils everywhere.
source imagery: [Galileo@JPL] [ Corona@NRO]

How simple it is to drift into interpretation - even a farcically-inspired one - such as the face on Mars cult - when you have a few preconceived mental notions to get you going. I had fallen into one of the pitfalls that goes with instant science - looking at something with my experience as a guide and a bias, seeing something familiar, and assuming that it indeed was what it appeared to be.

I am a space biologist, actually, an "Astrobiologist", someone who could be easily convinced that this was a life-capable planet - indeed, one who very much wants this to be a fertile abode for life. I was sitting in a room where the images would soon be shown to a waiting world and I was going to try and be objective. Nope. I had spent a few minutes on the phone with a NASA HQ science manager a little earlier in the day. At one point he mused that the earlier Galileo press conference had been a bit of a disappointment in that people were not asking questions about the topic being presented - in that case Ganymede. "All they kept asking was 'is there life on Europa' " he said. Since today's conference was about Europa, it was obvious that the issue of life on Europa was going to be the main focus of the questions later in the conference.

A reporter friend of mine told me that this press conference was quite sedate when compared with the August 1996 conference surrounding the announcement of putative microfossils in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. At that conference, reporters had crowded in, ala sharks in a feeding frenzy, to see and photograph the rather unassuming AH 8-whatever meteorite itself. No, this was rather tame crowd. I was sitting in the front row, and looked back to see what sort of audience had assembled. The auditorium was perhaps 3/4 full - several hundred people - almost exclusively white males aged 35-55. I could only count 7 women. Strange.

You almost got the feeling that everyone knew that the pictures were going to really point towards confirming what many people had come to accept as the likely truth about Europa: a world with ice covered oceans. The Mars announcement surprised people, even if they would later admit that they had expected exactly this sort of news for years. There had been little advanced knowledge that such a discovery was iminent, hence all of the hoopla. No, the Europa encounters and the imagery availability dates had been well known for some time - in some cases, for years. As such, this crowd of science reporters had probably been formulating their questions for a decade.

A question was asked as to what sort of life might exist on Europa. Several comments regarding the types of life found in deep oceanic trenches near geothermal vents were mentioned. At one point I leaned forward to a reporter I have known for 20 years and whispered "Whales". He chuckled. Last summer, NASA was caught somewhat off guard when word of possible discoveries regarding life on Mars began to circulate. When facts are scarce, rumors abound, even among well-trained reporters. This reporter was part of the "I dunno. What have you heard?" chain of events.

In the days leading up to the hastily called press conference, this reporter had recalled hearing from sources that NASA had found "worms on Mars". This was obviously incomplete repeat of some semi-informed source who had spoken with someone who had seen the photos and had made comments of "small possible bacterial fossils, somewhat 'worm-shaped' in appearance". Being in the information mongering business - and slightly hard-of-hearing myself, this reminded me of Emily Litella (Gilda Radner) on Saturday Night Live in the mid-1970's when she mused about all the fuss regarding "Violins on Television" and "Endangered Feces".

Let's Get Serious

I almost forgot: I am here because I am an Astrobiologist and a reporter.

On with the Science! Here is my serious replay of the information presented at the press conference.

Finale: Back to Europa

Right after Dr. Floyd et al discover Chlorophyll on Europa, their probe stops functioning. During a post mortem meeting someone says:

"Maybe we should send another probe:"

With the dual catalysts of Martian discoveries and Europan possibilities, a large number of Discovery proposals have been submitted. I have gotten word from a variety of sources that these are exciting proposals. The Europa Ice Clipper, which is essentially Stardust to Europa with a copper cannon ball is an example of some of the novel thinking that has manifested itself in spacecraft design.

You can bet I'll be at the next press conference in February when the next batch of photos arrives - ones taken even closer to Europa.