NASA chief scientist Nicola Fox: ‘It’s hard to believe there isn’t life somewhere else in the universe’

Nicola Fox, 56, is a physicist, engineer and chief scientist at the U.S. space agency NASA. “The best job on the planet,” she says. The biggest challenge she has ever faced was in 2010, when her husband, also an aerospace scientist, died suddenly, leaving her alone to care for their two children, aged one and three. Her life fell apart. She thought she would never be able to work again. At the time, she was the scientist in charge of the Parker Solar Probe, a $1.5 billion mission that was to become the first robotic spacecraft to touch the Sun. For the first time, she learned to ask for help from others and to understand that there is nothing wrong in accepting it, she says.

Fourteen years later, Fox has been in her position as associate administrator for science since 2023, with 100 missions and some 10,000 collaborators under her charge. She is visiting Spain to celebrate the 60th anniversary of space cooperation between Madrid and the United States, especially at the Robledo de Chavela Deep Space Station, on the outskirts of the capital. Its antennas receive daily messages from craft that traverse space millions of miles away, including the only two that have ever left the solar system. The agreement between the two countries is set to be renewed for the next 15 years. In this interview, the expert explains what the agency’s main scientific objective is and how it hopes to achieve it.

Question. You say that you managed to overcome the shock of 2010 thanks to teamwork.

Answer. Parker Solar Probe is my favorite mission, I have no problem saying that. [Fox shows the pendant she’s wearing, a miniature reproduction of the craft]. The science you do is inspirational. The technology is amazing and groundbreaking. But it really is the relationships that you form. Despite the enormous demands and pressure, everyone strives to support each other. The question was always: What do you need? When I was going through a terrible time in my life, the Parker Solar Probe team was just there and supported me through it.

Q. The Parker probe launched in 2018. Where is it now?

A. In November, we will make our seventh flyby of Venus and the probe will be put into its final configuration. On December 24, it will make its closest approach to the Sun, some 3.83 billion miles from the surface.

Q. What can we expect from this flyby?

A. I don’t know yet. I’m going to be very nervous, I always am. We’re going to lose contact with the spacecraft as it passes behind the Sun. We get a tone that tells us everything is OK and then we have to wait for the flyby. And then on the other side, we get a tone that hopefully tells us we’re still OK. It’s a pretty nerve-wracking 11 days.

Q. You have many other missions under your charge. What is the most important question you can answer?

A. The big one is are we alone in the universe? We are constantly looking for signs of life beyond Earth. When the Europa Clipper mission, which launched last week, reaches its destination we’ll do a study of what lies beneath the icy crust. Will we find water, chemicals, energy and stability, the basic ingredients of life? We’re trying to find out what conditions were like here on Earth before life started, and what caused it to start. It’s hard to study that here on Earth because life is very noisy. It’s very pervasive. We’ve kind of taken over everything. That is why we are turning to missions like Europa Clipper or Dragonfly, the mission that will explore Titan, a moon of Saturn, where we believe there is a water cycle like the one on Earth, but with methane. We’ll fly this. It’s like a drone, but it’s the size of a small car that will basically land and take data and then hop to other locations, looking for what the ingredients are that can sustain and support life.

Q. A few decades ago no one would have expected to find life in such places, but now it turns out that they are the most likely places to find it.

A. We tend to think of whether will we find life as we know it, but we really need to think about life as we don’t know it. We’re looking for really strange forms of life, or a second origin of life. If you go down to the depths of the ocean, you find extremophiles that live in superheated vents where nothing should be able to survive, and yet they do. When we look at distant planets around distant stars and we’re looking for a rocky planet that has an atmosphere, we need to do the chemistry to look at what the atmosphere is made of. Could something survive in a different atmosphere? It doesn’t have to be an atmosphere like ours. That kind of thinking, about the idea of life as we don’t know it, is a really interesting aspect.

Q. Given the complexity of these environments, how close can we get to these possible life forms?

A. With Europa Clipper and Dragonfly we’ll find a lot about what our solar system was like when it was first developing, before life started. With the amazing James Webb Space Telescope, we can detect signatures of what’s in the atmospheres in super, super distant planets. In 2027, we’ll launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will carry a coronagraph. This will allow us to study the atmospheres of other stars in the same way that we now study that of the Sun. This instrument will block the light from very distant stars and allow us to observe the planets around them with more fidelity. And with this information, we will launch a third telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, specifically designed to look for and find planets that could sustain life.

Q. Do you believe there is life beyond Earth?

A. It’s hard to believe that there isn’t life somewhere else. There are trillions and trillions and trillions of stars all over this universe. We just have to find one with the right relationship to a star, very similar to ours, not very active, otherwise it would just sterilize everything with radiation. It’s finding the right relationship between a star and a planet. And then hopefully we’ll be able to find signatures of life elsewhere in the universe

Q. In two years, a woman will set foot on the Moon for the first time as part of NASA’s Artemis program. Other space powers such as China are also eager to locate and use lunar resources. Do you think there is any risk that the United States will cease to be the world leader in this field?

A. The Artemis program has something called the Artemis Accords, which was led by NASA but has been signed by countries all over the world. These agreements express that we are not going to the Moon as a single country, but as a global community. We want everyone to see themselves as part of the Artemis program. It’s a really important difference from where we were with Apollo.

Q. How much science is going to be done during this race to the Moon?

A. Scientifically, we’re ready to go. We have experiments that will fly on Artemis 2, the flyby of the Moon [in 2025], and we’ve already selected experiments to go with Artemis 3, which will go to the surface with astronauts [in 2026]. We’ve designed tools for the astronauts to take, we have a team of geologists working with them so they know what they’re going to find when they land on the Moon. We’re going to take every opportunity to do good science, whether it’s with a lander that we send up ahead of time or whether it’s the astronauts carrying it with them.

Q. What role will Spain and the Robledo station play in all this?

A. The station is super important. We can send all these amazing spacecraft into space but if you can’t bring the data down, there’s no point. And that is what the Deep Space Network [located in the United States, Australia, and Spain] does. The station itself is really critical. We recovered the Voyager 1 spacecraft, with all six dishes talking to Voyager at the same time. The first signals from the Moon landing [in 1969] came through that station. There is a very vibrant partnership between NASA and Spain, for example in the development of the meteorological station on board Perseverance, on Mars, which was critical when were deciding the right time to fly Ingenuity.

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