Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution selected by NASA to investigate ocean worlds and their organic carbon cycles

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Woods Hole, Mass. (Dec. 3, 2025)—Ocean worlds such as Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and Saturn’s counterpart, Enceladus, could be among the most favorable places to discover life beyond Earth—and perhaps even a second, independent origin of life. With NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft scheduled to arrive at Europa in 2030 to determine whether its icy crust or under-ice ocean might be able to support life, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has recently been selected by NASA to lead a five-year project (value of award ~$5M) that will combine a wide range of scientific disciplines to investigate ocean worlds in new, collaborative ways. The project is slated to begin in 2026.

In particular, the Investigating Ocean Worlds (InvOW) project will seek to improve the analysis of data related to carbon-rich molecules that could be an indicator of biological activity, and that will be a focus of future life-detection missions. According to Chris German, WHOI senior scientist and InvOW principal investigator, the new project will investigate how physical, chemical, and possibly biological processes active on ocean worlds like Europa or Enceladus might affect data collected by future space missions that hunt for signs of life.

“If you are alive today, this is the first generation where the question of whether there is life elsewhere in the universe could be answered in your lifetime,” said German. “Previously, this was an abstract, intellectual, and philosophical question. We now know enough to say that it is entirely plausible that there is life out there, within humanity’s reach, and we just need to go and look.”

The InvOW project team spans 16 laboratories across the United States and will integrate a combination of disciplines (ocean, polar, and space sciences) and use interdisciplinary approaches (theoretical modelling, laboratory experiments, and fieldwork) to investigate three different domains on ocean worlds: the rocky subseafloor, the ocean itself, and the icy outer shell, known as the cryosphere. A unifying focus will be to investigate how organic materials—potentially indicative of life—might be modified as they travel through Europa’s or any ocean world’s different domains before they reach a spacecraft’s detection system.

“Identifying carbon compounds on ocean worlds that would provide unambiguous evidence for the presence of life is challenging,” explained German. On Earth, ocean life consumes so much of the organic carbon present, very little is left unconsumed. As a result, there is little to no “signal-to-noise” problem between detecting organic compounds that are the result of life against a background of non-biological material. In space, the opposite may be true. On other ocean worlds more distant from the Sun, where there is significantly less energy to support biological activity, non-biological organic matter might dominate.

“On ocean worlds, identifying valid indicators of life might be a needle-in-a-haystack kind of problem,” said German. “Seeing through the background noise to be able to pick out signals that are definitively due to life will require rigorous examination. We need to rule out all of the other ways that signals could be generated, by non-life processes, so that they don’t otherwise confound mission scientists.”

“With focused research, there’s a lot that can be done—a tremendous amount of groundwork that can be laid— to optimize the design and scientific yield of future missions,” said InvOW deputy principal investigator Tori Hoehler, Director of the Center for Life Detection at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “The InvOW award gives us the opportunity to do just that, by bringing together planetary scientists and Earth oceanographers to understand alien oceans the way we understand our own—as complex systems where geology, physics, chemistry, and possibly biology, work together in concert. That perspective, and our team’s ability to fluidly integrate a diversity of expertise, has been and will be at the heart of our efforts to conduct the foundational science on which future exploration will be built.”

“As we search for signs of life beyond Earth, it is essential to understand not only how those signs are first produced, but also the forces that shape and obscure them over time,” said project co-investigator and WHOI associate scientist Susan Lang. “This project is especially compelling because it takes a planetary-scale view, exploring how processes ranging from below the ocean to the surfaces of ice sheets affect the life signatures that rise to the outermost layers of an ocean world, where future missions will search for evidence of life.”

“This project is exciting because it pulls together all 25 years of my academic, scientific, and professional experiences,” said project InvOW co-investigator Brandy Toner, Professor in the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. “It is humbling and motivating because the work pushes me to the edges of my knowledge and requires the insights, innovation, and genuine collaboration of 15 other research teams. It is our job to help NASA apply what we have learned about Earth's oceans to other places in our solar system; what to expect, what to measure, how to interpret data returns, and maybe someday, sample returns. As a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I think this might be even better.”

The Investigating Ocean Worlds project builds on the NASA-funded Exploring Ocean Worlds (ExOW) initiative that German also led and that involved a number of the same scientists. While the earlier project focused on understanding physical and geological processes on ocean worlds, InvOW focuses on what German describes as the biggest problem to confront: making sense of any organic molecules detected from future ocean world missions, starting with the Europa Clipper. “During this period, while the Europa Clipper is heading to Europa, let’s prepare by focusing on this one specific thing: How do you measure organic compounds and know whether they are indicators of life or habitability, or perhaps of nothing specific?”

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About Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate an understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. WHOI’s pioneering discoveries stem from an ideal combination of science and engineering—one that has made it one of the most trusted and technically advanced leaders in basic and applied ocean research and exploration anywhere. WHOI is known for its multidisciplinary approach, superior ship operations, and unparalleled deep-sea robotics capabilities. We play a leading role in ocean observation and operate the most extensive suite of data-gathering platforms in the world. Top scientists, engineers, and students collaborate on more than 800 concurrent projects worldwide—both above and below the waves—pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibility. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu