
Last Monday, CST Assistant Director Erin Flowers hosted back-to-back screenings of NASA’s ‘Other Worlds: Europa’ and ‘Other Worlds: Titan’ documentaries, directed by Princeton alumni Elizabeth Landau ‘06 and James Tralie ‘17. The ‘Other Worlds’ series explores the mysteries of the solar system, interviewing scientists that are using the new James Webb Space Telescope to study our closest celestial neighbors. Europa and Titan are two moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn respectively that have astrobiological interest. Europa could potentially have a subsurface ocean of liquid water, while Titan is the only other place in the solar system with liquid on its surface, though in this case it is liquid methane instead of liquid water. The two documentaries discussed current knowledge on these two fascinating moons, the current efforts of JWST scientists, and upcoming missions. Following the screenings, there was a Q&A session with the directors, Dr. Flowers who is a research associate with the NASA Dragonfly Mission to Titan, and Dr. Jamey Szalay, a research scientist at Princeton’s Space Physics Lab who has worked on NASA’s Juno mission at Jupiter (among many other NASA missions!). His recent work on Europa, featured in the New York Times, used the Juno mission’s Europa flyby in 2022 to discover how much oxygen is produced at Europa’s surface.