PrincetonUniversity
 

Tullis Onstott, professor of geosciences, collects samples of rock and water from deep gold mines of South Africa and analyzes them in the laboratory for signs of life. NASA is interested in expanding his approach for use on Mars.

photo: Denise Applewhite

Onstott looking for life in peculiar places

by Steven Schultz
After 10 years of burrowing deeper and deeper into the Earth in search of life in odd places, Princeton geoscientist Tullis Onstott is taking an opportunity to look up.

Onstott is part of a multi-institutional team that recently won a major NASA grant to devise methods for identifying signs of life deep within other planets. The consortium, called the Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee Astrobiology Institute, will receive $5 million over five years with a goal of developing instruments that could extract evidence of alien microbes, or even the organisms themselves, from underneath the surface of Mars.

"What we're trying to do is build a program that would take us to Mars within the next 15 years," said Onstott.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose the Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee team in part because of Onstott's expertise working at the intersection of microbiology and geology. Since 1994, he has been leading a hunt for microbes in gold mines of South Africa, extracting previously unimagined organisms from searing hot, radiation-bathed rock two miles beneath the Earth's surface. Before that, he pulled exotic organisms from American natural gas reservoirs. As part of the new Mars effort, he is beginning a project to look for organisms in the icy gold mines in Northern Canada.

"It's amazing where miners go to get gold," Onstott said. "It's 'extreme mining.'" The same could be said of Onstott's science. He and members of his lab regularly descend into these mines and, amid the grime, din and stifling heat, collect uncontaminated samples of rock and water that they carry to the surface for detailed laboratory analysis. Their efforts have paid off with the discovery of extraordinary organisms that are completely isolated from the sun and the normal surface ecosystems and yet eke out a living in the deep rock. For energy, these bugs consume hydrogen gas that gets split from water by radioactivity.

The Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee team, which is led by geochemist Lisa Pratt of Indiana University, was among 12 groups that received funding and the designation as a "lead team" in NASA's Astrobiology Institute after a competition that started with 38 groups. The lead teams represent a wide range of research under the general subject of astrobiology, from understanding the formation of habitable planets to investigating the origin, evolution and biology of life on Earth.

Read the full story in the Weekly Bulletin.