NASA executive Leslie Livesay: ‘We’re getting closer to being able to answer if there is life beyond Earth’

Leslie Livesay is deputy director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the research center where the largest robotic space missions carried out by the U.S. space agency are designed. During her nearly 40 years of experience at NASA, this mathematician and engineer has seen the potential of space probes grow from timid Martian cars, such as the Pathfinder of 1996, to the Perseverance of 2018, the largest and most sophisticated vehicle in history for exploring the red planet.

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.

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