April 18, 2022

Noa Essner

9th Grade

Ramaz Upper School

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, is renowned for its historic progress in space exploration and reaching new frontiers of discovery beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. Having maintained this reputation for over sixty years, it may come as a surprise that an agency concerned with space endeavors is now directing its focus somewhere else. One of NASA’s newest projects is taking place neither in outer space, the Earth’s atmosphere, nor in any lab across the United States; NASA is officially taking its studies underground. As of a few months ago, the administration has relocated a portion of its research down to the world’s deepest oceans.

In our Solar System alone, scientists worldwide have located numerous oceans on celestial bodies such as Mars and Saturn’s moons; however, an in-depth mapping of these waters is still lacking. That being said, scientists nonetheless have more knowledge of these foreign oceans than those located on planet Earth, which cover roughly 70% of its surface. This problem has been addressed by NASA by facing the problem head-on. They hope that by gaining a further understanding of oceans on Earth, this knowledge will mirror itself in outer space and potentially give them a further understanding of oceans on other planets and moons. 

The initiative behind this project is to explore what’s known as the Hadal Zone of different oceans, which according to Earth.com is “ the deepest reaches of the ocean…The hadal zone…starts at the ocean floor, around six kilometers below sea level. It consists only of trenches formed by the movements of the earth’s tectonic plates.” The area NASA hopes to explore is around the size of Australia, and in accordance, such a mammoth task will not be undertaken alone. Throughout the process, NASA will be working in partnership with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, otherwise known as WHOI. 

The first step in exploring the Hadal Zones is the designing and building of a waterproof machine or submarine with the capability to probe the darkest parts of the ocean, withstand its pressure, and take pictures to be sent back to NASA scientists and researchers. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, the building of a self-operating motor vehicle, given the name Orpheus in reference to Greek mythology, is underway. It uses cameras similar to that of NASA’s Perseverance rover to map what it sees and detects and uses sensors to remember where it’s been as well as to outline the shapes of what it’s looking at. Additionally, engineers at JPL will need to troubleshoot any possible issues, keeping in mind the imploding of the last water vehicle that attempted to explore the Hadal Zones, in 2014. 

This mission evidently won’t be easy, but with each trial and error, it becomes more and more of a realistic possibility. If successful, NASA’s initiative may yield some promising results. As an example, exploring the Hadal Zones could lead to the discovery of aquatic life there, as past experiments have already found aquatic organisms surviving harsh ocean conditions without the need to conduct photosynthesis, as they survived off of “chemicals on the seafloor.” A better understanding of the different ways and conditions in which life can exist, according to BBC Future, “could even provide clues about where scientists should be searching for alien life.”