How likely is habitability on icy worlds, and how would we search for it? This is one of the questions driving a research team led by Isik Kanik at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Kanik’s team was selected for a new grant from the NASA Astrobiology Institute for a five-year project looking at how metabolism could come about by way of chemical differences on icy worlds, and how signatures of these unbalanced states can be detected.