2025.08.06 | A Retrospective: Searching for Life in the Outer Solar System

On The Space Show for Wednesday, 6 August 2025:

A Retrospective (2016): Searching for Life in the Outer Solar System

A discussion of the proposed BRINE Discovery Mission to Enceladus and the status of the United States’ commercial space projects with the late Dr David Wilson, then Vice President of the Mars Society Australia and a research and development engineer at the Space Science and Astrobiology Division of the NASA Ames Research Center in California.

In 2012 and 2013, NASA's Ames Research Center undertook a series of studies using a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on Mars, defining possible payloads including deep drills for astrobiology missions and Earth return rockets for Mars sample return. In 2015 Ames proposed the IceBreaker search for life mission to Mars for NASA's Discovery Program and then a mission to Saturn's moon Enceladus, called BRINE.

(Recorded by The Space Show at a joint meeting of the Mars Society Australia and the Space Association of Australia in June 2016)

Planet Earth — Episode 67:

• The Earth's geocentre
• SWOT and Australia
• Five Queensland projects to accelerate the growth of the Earth observation industry

• Cloudsat.

(Inserts courtesy GSFC, JPL)