4 full episodes available · Documentary
Selected episodes. Availability varies by title; a show listing does not indicate every season.Go off-road with Dr. Amanda Stockton and her team as they venture into the lava fields of a recently-erupted volcano, studying how quickly microbial life on Earth recovers from such a catastrophic event. Follow the expedition team as they use drones to map the field site, take samples of volcanic rock, and perform laboratory analyses; all mimicking the same exploration and science performed by the Mars Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.
Journey into the wilderness of Greenland alongside Dr. Abigail Allwood and her team, as they investigate a controversial claim of ancient signs of life in an outcrop of rocks that are over 3.7 billion years old. Watch as they continue to develop virtual reality technology that is currently being used by NASA’s Mars Exploration Program to bring scientists to sites visited by our Martian rovers.
Dive alongside Dr. Richard Camilli and his team as they explore the undersea volcanoes off of the coast of Santorini, Greece. Testing a suite of autonomous underwater vehicles, the team hopes to imbue their robotic explorers with the same scientific reasoning of a human astrobiologist, helping us characterize alien oceans and remotely search for signs of life on distant ocean worlds.
Delve deep beneath the volcanoes of Hawai’i with four teams of NASA astrobiologists as they investigate how life might survive in the subsurface of other worlds. Inside cavernous lava tubes, these scientists search for microbial life in volcanic rock, analyze subsurface gases, and build an augmented reality model of the field site – all to help advance NASA’s future exploration of Mars and beyond.