We're diving Europa this week on planetary radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan.

All the usual suspects are with us once again and

we're still all about exploring the universe but today we'll try it a little differently.

Howard and Michelle Hall have just finished under the C 3D, an IMAX

film that will take you to the alien environment known as the deep sea. We'll sit down with

them and one of our planet's foremost experts on how

we'll someday swim in a sea that is half a billion miles away, the one that

awaits us under the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. It's a wild ride, one that Bill Nye is going to prepare

us for with his commentary about what may be the closest thing on Earth to that distant sea. Put on your parka as Bill takes us to the South Pole.

Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society, and this week, let's look down by looking east. I refer of course to Lake Vostok.

Now Lake Vostok and the Vostock crater on Mars are named for the Russian word for East.

Now in Antarctica there's a lake named Vostock.

But it's under two and a half miles of ice and people are drilling down.

There were then two soccer fields, 200 meters, of this lake and they want to bore all the way down

and look at these microbes that live in this ancient lake and perhaps these microbes

in this Antarctic cold would be related to the kind of microbes you might find on Mars.

But here's the thing.

Nobody wants to contaminate Lake Vostoc.

Nobody wants to make a mess of it and fill it with human microbes and stuff from the surface because that would contaminate it.

We'd never know how it was preserved, frozen, and ice.

We would change everything by accident.

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