Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences

When water erupts on the ocean moons of Jupiter and Saturn, it could freeze into fluffy ice with the texture of a croissant, presenting a hazard for future lander missions. “If the surface is really covered with this type of highly porous, fragile water ice, that would definitely pose some serious engineering issues,” says Ingrid Daubar, a DEEPS Associate Professor of Research and a scientist on NASA’s Europa Clipper orbiter mission. “We’d have to re-envision the types of landing mechanisms we thought might work on Europa.”

As Project Scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, Associate Professor Ingrid Daubar is at the forefront of efforts to explore Jupiter's icy and intriguing moon Europa. In this article, she shares insights into the mission’s objectives, the challenges of deep space exploration, and the quest to determine whether Europa could support life.

New research offer clues to Mars’s history, including what violent collisions it experienced in the past and how it lost its magnetic field. Professor Ingrid Daubar, former member of the InSight science team, commented on these recent studies, saying, “There are connections to our own planet, to how planets form in general and to how we understand different planets outside our solar system.”

New research is using tracks from dust devils to learn about the whirlwinds and potentially guide future mission planning. "Dust devils themselves are difficult to capture in images because they are so short-lived," said Associate Professor Ingrid Daubar, lead author of the study. "The tracks they leave behind last longer, so we are able to observe them more thoroughly."