Planetary astronomer Bonnie Buratti vividly recalls the moment she first heard about the possibility of life on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. It was the 1980s, and Buratti was a graduate student at Cornell University, studying images of Jupiter’s moons captured by the Voyager 1 and 2 missions in 1979. Even in those early, low-resolution images, Europa stood out. “It looked like a cracked egg,” she says. These cracks in the icy shell, likely filled with material rising from below, suggested the presence of something beneath the ice.
Buratti remembers fellow graduate student Steven Squyres discussing the idea that Europa’s ice might conceal a salty ocean. “He said, ‘Well, there’s an ocean underneath, and where there’s water, there’s life,’” she recalls. “And people laughed at him.” But the laughter has since faded. Over the past four decades, Buratti has witnessed the quest for life in the solar system evolve from a joke into a flagship mission. She is now a deputy project scientist for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, launched on October 14 to determine if Europa is indeed a habitable world.
Buratti’s fascination with space science began in childhood, coinciding with the dawn of the space age. She was a child when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and a teenager when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. “I got a telescope when I was in third grade,” she says, recalling her early stargazing from her front lawn in Bethlehem, Pa. “From an early age, I was always curious.”
Planetary science drew her in with its larger-than-life personalities. In graduate school, she worked with renowned scientists like Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, who were pioneering the search for extraterrestrial life. This experience instilled in her the belief that the universe could be teeming with life, though it didn’t provide the support she needed for her Ph.D. She later worked with the less famous but equally charismatic astronomer Joe Veverka, who provided her with the Voyager images.
Buratti joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., in 1985 and has been there ever since. While the Galileo spacecraft was uncovering evidence of Europa’s subsurface ocean in the 1990s, Buratti was exploring Saturn with the Cassini mission. Saturn’s moons revealed surprises like hydrocarbon lakes on Titan, watery plumes from Enceladus, and a mysterious ridge on Iapetus.
These discoveries advanced the idea that subsurface oceans in the solar system might not be unusual. Hints of oceans have since been found as far away as Pluto, Buratti’s favorite planet. There may even be ocean worlds orbiting other stars. When Europa Clipper arrives at Jupiter in 2030, scientists will look to this moon as an example of potentially common habitable worlds in the universe.
Buratti joined the Clipper mission in 2022, tasked with ensuring the team maximizes the scientific output. “We have always felt that our role is to enhance science, to get the very best science out of the mission,” she says. She and the scientific community are confident they’ll find something significant. “We’re pretty certain there’s a habitable environment,” she says, echoing her graduate school days. “On Earth, wherever you see water, you see life. So, I think it’s a really good place to look.”
