"Leslie Livesay de la NASA: 'Nos acercamos a descubrir si hay vida más allá de nuestro planeta'"
Leslie Livesay es la subdirectora del Laboratorio de Propulsión a Chorro (JPL) de la NASA, el centro de investigación donde se conciben las más ambiciosas misiones robóticas espaciales realizadas por la agencia espacial estadounidense. A lo largo de sus casi 40 años de trayectoria en NASA, esta matemática e ingeniera ha sido testigo del crecimiento impresionante de las sondas espaciales, que han evolucionado desde los modestos vehículos marcianos, como el Pathfinder de 1996, hasta el Perseverance de 2018, el mayor y más sofisticado aparato jamás diseñado para explorar el planeta rojo.
One of the scientist’s main objectives in her new position will be to oversee an even more difficult task: to bring samples from Mars back to Earth before its biggest competitor does: China, a country with which the U.S. is also competing for the exploration of the Moon. In this conversation with EL PAÍS, during her recent visit to Spain, Livesay reviews what NASA’s large unmanned space missions will be like, some of which will be essential for astronauts to be able to reach the Moon and Mars later on.
Answer. For me it’s: are we alone? Is there life somewhere else? We’re getting closer and closer to being able to answer that, and our technology is getting better. We just launched the Europa Clipper mission. It’s not specifically designed to look for life, but we know that on this moon of Jupiter there’s a saltwater ocean beneath the surface that’s twice the size of the entire oceans on Earth, and it could support life. So we’re going there to investigate whether it has the right composition and structure, whether all the things we would need for life to exist are present.