Christopher Chyba says that there are two worlds that are showing signs of planetary evolution, which mean possible life signs. The two worlds are Mars and Europa. Some of the major projects going on that are related to Europa. Cynthia Phillips is the leader of one project, Kevin Hand is another, and Max Bernstein, who's a SETI institute P.I., is the leader of the third project, and Christopher Chyba is as well working on another project.
Cynthia Phillips is studying what she calls a "change comparison". Her experiment goes back to when she was a graduate associate. She looked at surface images of IO from the images of Voyager and compared them to more recent surface images from Galileo in 1990. She is now using this technique on Europa. So far she hasn't found any distinct changes through twenty years.
There have been some chemical reactions taking place on Europa, which Kevin Hand and Max Bernstein believe is the simultaneous production of electron donors and electron acceptors. All humans and animals on Earth combine our electron donor, which is reduced carbon, with oxygen, which is our electron acceptor. Kevin has been working on finding ways that these reactions could be produced on Europa with the limited information we know about the moon right now. They are mostly examined through the action of radiation.
Christopher Chyba as been searching for biomarkers in the rocks. "The are certain chemical compounds that are commonly used as biomarkers in rocks that go back millions of years in the terrestrial past". The biomarkers can stand whatever radiation they got from the past and are detectable in the rocks from the decomposing of uranium, potassium and everything else over the past two billion years, and is being compared to radiation and oxidation on the surface of Europa. Kevin Hand and Max Bernstein are going to be doing laboratory simulations where they will be "irradiating" nitrogen-containing biomarkers at a low temperature in his laboratory "apparatus" to try and understand how and when the biomarkers can survive and how radiation changes them.
