kanu101/Flickr, Jirka Matousek/Flickr, Anthonares/Wikimedia Commons, L. Richard Martin Jr./Flickr
When Nathalie Cabrol was little, her grandfather gave her a pair of binoculars he had picked up as a soldier in Germany after the liberation of France. It was her first real glimpse at the wonders of the moon and stars. “Later,” Cabrol says with a laugh, “my toys became more elaborate and complex.”
Today she uses robots to hunt for alien life. Cabrol is a planetary geologist and astrobiologist at the SETI Institute’s Carl Sagan Center and NASA’s Ames Research Center, both in Mountain View, Calif. When she’s not using autonomous robots to explore extreme environments, she’s jumping into mountaintop lakes herself using specialized scuba gear. Her goal is to understand the conditions under which life on Earth can exist and apply them to searches for life on other worlds, such as Mars or Saturn’s moon Titan.