Meet the 'Indiana Jones' of NASA

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>> Chris McKay: My name is Chris McKay I'm a planetary scientist for NASA. My interest is studying life in extreme environments in order to search for life on other planets.

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>> When I went to school I studied physical science, physics in particular, got interested in astronomy, from astronomy got interested in planets and then from planets got interested in life and then I realized that life was all around me right here on earth and the best way to study it was to go to places on earth where life is living in conditions like we expect on other planets. Right now I'm focused on exploring the Polar Regions and also deserts, basically places on earth that are dry, cold and dry, hot and dry. So I just came back from 2 months in Antarctica studying a place called the Dry Valley, very, very cold, very, very dry studying how life survives in those dry, cold places. Typically when we go out to the field we'll bring with us a bunch of equipment that we'll leave in place, that we'll monitor the environment, it'll monitor the climate, it'll monitor the organisms, what they're doing, how they're living. We'll also take samples, bring them back to the lab and study them with microscopes and extracting DNA and looking at the soil mineralogy and the organic content. One of the interesting things we're found is that the environments we study, deserts and polar regions, not only are relevant to the search for life on Mars, but they're relevant to understanding global warming on earth. It seems that these desert environments are very sensitive to climate so we've been studying them for decades now because of their connection to Mars and suddenly we see a new relevance to our work and understanding these ecosystems as the first responders if you will to global warming. Where I want to go with my research is more in depth studies of dry and cold environments on earth and then take that to Mars and craft a mission that will search for and hopefully discover evidence of life on Mars and understand what that life is and how it came to be all the while generating information and helps us understand life as a phenomenon and how to manage the earth better.

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====