CEDAR CITY — In its search for habitable worlds and life beyond planet Earth, NASA has tapped a variety of scientists with a long list of specialties. And one “overjoyed” Southern Utah University student recently added his name to the list.

Price-native Dallin Nelson is entering his junior year at the university, where he’s studying computer science and music. He also just finished a coveted internship with NASA’s Europa Inspiring Clipper: Opportunities for the Next-generation Scientists program. There, he supported the Europa Clipper mission in Santa Cruz, California.

The Europa Clipper mission is expected to launch Oct. 10. It will travel to the Jovian system, where it will orbit around Jupiter, performing a “detailed investigation of the giant planet’s moon Europa,” NASA states.

Nelson said one reason NASA is interested in Europa is that there is evidence indicating it could be habitable. The moon is covered in an icy shell estimated to be 10-15 miles thick.

Underneath the layer of ice, scientists say they believe there is an ocean, 40-100 miles deep, holding twice the amount of water as Earth’s oceans.

The “building blocks of life” include liquid water and the elements carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur, among others. These elements comprise approximately 98% of life on Earth and are believed to exist on Europa, according to NASA.

Nelson said Clipper isn’t “quite to the point of looking for aliens,” but if conditions look favorable to life, NASA may do so during future missions.

“There’s so many different types of life that live here, just on Earth, and they’re so different from each other that it’s like – it’s almost impossible to imagine the possibilities of biology that happen in different conditions,” Nelson said.

“It’s awesome that we’re working on these missions that can potentially answer some of these questions of whether we’re actually alone or whether life exists beyond just Earth,” he continued.

Nelson was one of 40 undergraduate interns chosen from across the U.S. for the internship. The program is in its first year, and the agency is expected to choose interns to work on the mission until 2034.

Nelson found the program independently while searching for something to work on between semesters. He applied to multiple NASA internships, and getting chosen to support the Europa Clipper mission was “life-changing,” he said.

“I remember when I got the email: At first, it was complete disbelief because I definitely wasn’t expecting to get this,” he recalled. “I knew that … there would be a lot of other people looking for an opportunity like this, and so it was disbelief. But then, definitely, I was overjoyed to have this opportunity and I was ready to take it no matter what the conditions were. I was ready to learn.”

Throughout the 10-week program, he was mentored by Dr. Benjamin Idini, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a member of the Europa Clipper science team. Each intern conducted original research to support the Europa Clipper mission “in the hopes that some of these interns will then grow up to be on the actual science team,” Nelson said.

Nelson said he created a machine-learning model – a subset of artificial intelligence – to detect craters on the moon’s surface and gather data about its geological history.

“If you can see more craters, that means that the surface is older, but if there’s less craters, that means it’s newer,” he said. “Which means that there’s some sort of geological process that’s renewing the surface.”

Europa’s surface is covered in evidence of its geological processes, including ridges and cracks. Observations thus far indicate there are fewer craters on its surface, which is estimated to be 40-90 million years old.

Scientists believe the ocean could be warming and cracking the icy surface, thus erasing craters, NASA states. Comparatively, Jupiter’s moon, Callisto, is estimated to be several billion years old.

Learning more about conditions on the surface could give researchers a better understanding of what lies under the ice shell, Nelson said.

“If there’s life, it would be in the subsurface ocean, and so we want to learn more about that – these features on the surface help us,” he added.

Life is less likely to exist on the moon’s surface because Jupiter bombards it with radiation. However, according to NASA, the gas giant’s gravity could create conditions for life under the ice by flexing Europa’s interior and raising the temperature on its ocean floor.

“The flexing forces energy into the moon’s interior, which then seeps out as heat (think of how repeatedly bending a paperclip generates heat),” the agency states. “The more the moon’s interior flexes, the more heat is generated.”

This could create hydrothermal vents, similar to those in Earth’s oceans, that supply nutrients to deep sea creatures.

Once the radiation-tolerant Clipper spacecraft reaches Jupiter in 2030, it will conduct nearly 50 close flybys around Europa to take high-resolution photographs of the moon to learn more about its composition, according to NASA.

The spacecraft will also collect various other data about the moon’s magnetic field, ocean and potential subsurface lakes, among other things. It will also survey the surface for eruptions of warmer water and evidence of water particles in the atmosphere.

Nelson said approximately 90% of Europa’s surface will be imaged, which will create a large data set. It would take humans a significant amount of time to find and count each crater. Comparatively, the AI model would be more efficient and “much faster.”

Nelson said he built the model from scratch in Python, a programming language. While there’s “still a lot of work to be done,” he said he successfully created a model that matches the performance of similar programs in scientific literature.

“This was also the first time making a model to detect craters on icy surfaces,” he said, adding that he feels “very accomplished with the work that I’ve done here.”

What’s next?

Nelson still has two more years of undergraduate work to complete, and is looking forward to graduate school afterward, he said. He’s not sure yet what he wants to do after graduation.

“I have a lot of options before me and I have some time to kind of figure that out,” he said. “This internship has been invaluable and gives me more context of obviously what it’s like to work for NASA or work in space science and also to see how many different opportunities there are for different types of people on what are very nonlinear career paths.”

Still, Nelson said it would be “amazing” to work on similar projects in the future, describing space exploration and research as a possible dream job.

“That’s definitely a potential goal, and obviously, I have a very, very good stepping stone,” he said, adding that being on the edge of known science and conducting original research was “just an awesome opportunity.”

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