NASA will study the Hawaii sea volcano to find ways to hunt aliens

NASA will soon visit Hawaii's Lo'ihi volcano, which is located at 0.9 km below the Pacific Ocean, to find a way to . hunt for life outside the solar system.

Accordingly, NASA's expedition, called SUBSEA , will visit the undersea volcanoes that are home to countless species of bacteria - to find out how life will survive in those Deep, harsh and dark space of the solar system.

Lo'ihi is an active volcano located about 50 miles from the Big Island coast.

NASA - intending to carry out the mission in August - will use the rocks and bacteria collected from the volcano to plan an ambitious robot adventure to the deep seas, if they can funding enough.

This space agency is particularly interested in Saturn and Jupiter - both are believed to have thermal spray holes and oceans beneath their thick ice cover.

Burning hot holes are famous for emitting thick black smoke.

Deep-sea gaps are quite common in the ocean on Earth, which exist thousands of feet deep in the Atlantic and Pacific. There, scorching hot holes are known for emitting thick black smoke, feeding on extreme bacteria and deep-like creatures. In some locations, shrimp, slugs, and crabs also rely on these holes.

"But Lo'ihi is different," said Darlene Lim, a NASA biologist, head of the SUBSEA program.

Scientists suspect that if deep sea holes exist on other worlds, they will be like Lo'ihi, which is not so hot as the holes emit black smoke deep in the Atlantic Ocean. .

These black smoke heats up to 371 degrees Celsius, while according to planetary scientists, the holes in Enceladus are only 50 to 200 degrees Celsius.

NOAA's Nautilus explorer ship.

NASA itself has no explorer ship, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Commission (NOAA) does. So NASA will work with this agency to study Lo'ihi for 21 days. Remote vehicles (ROV) will be sent to Lo'ihi to collect rock samples and observe the microbial community around the volcano.

"It is extremely rich in biodiversity," said Craig Moyer, a volcanic microbiologist at the University of Western Washington, who studied Lo'ihi for more than two decades.

Life around Lo'ihi is not only a variety of biochemical bacteria - eating chemicals in a dark world - but these communities also change in parallel with the oscillating activities of Lo'ihi. .

The pipe worm lives at a depth of 2.5 km at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.

Since the explosion in 1996, Lo'ihi has become quite quiet, and the heat holes have also cooled, meaning that this volcano no longer emits ordinary gases like hydrogen and hydrogen sulfied. Therefore, the bacteria here can eat the chemicals and iron around it.

But when Lo'ihi works again, the heat and new chemicals will allow other bacteria to proliferate.

"I am sure we will see the activity of the creature there increase again," Moyer said, recalling that the Kilauea eruption in Hawaii is highly likely to share a deep pipeline system with Lo'ihi.

The ice surface of the moon Europa.

Not only because Kilauea is active at this time - erupting enough lava to fill 45,000 Olympic standard pools last month - the area around Lo'ihi is still in US territory, giving allow NASA to more easily conduct research.

"It's a great place to interfere," Lim said.

When SUBSEA finishes, NASA will plan to visit another volcanic hole system in 2019, and Lim hopes that will help bring NASA space program planners into the future. Hints on where is best to search for life on alien worlds like Moon Enceladus.

Europa also has the potential to live in oceans below its thick ice surface.

"Wherever you have liquid water, there is a high possibility that you will find life" - Moyer said - "I expect both of these moons."