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Dr. Morgan Cable is a research scientist in the Laboratory Studies group at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She is the Science Lead for the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) concept and Co-Deputy PI of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) Instrument aboard the Mars 2020 (Perseverance) rover. Dr. Cable has worked on the Cassini Mission, is a Co-Investigator of the Dragonfly mission to Titan, and is serving multiple roles on Europa Clipper. She was recently appointed as a CIFAR Fellow for the Earth 4D: Subsurface Science and Exploration Program. She previously served as the Ocean Worlds Program Area Scientist for the Planetary Mission Formulation Office, and as supervisor of the Astrobiology and Ocean Worlds Group.
Morgan’s research focuses on organic and biomarker detection strategies, through both in situ and remote sensing techniques. While earning her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, she designed receptor sites for the detection of bacterial spores, the toughest form of life. As a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at JPL, Morgan developed novel protocols to analyze organics such as amines and fatty acids using small, portable microfluidic sensors. She is currently working as a Collaborator on the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE), an instrument selected for NASA’s next mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa; this spectrometer will map Europa’s surface and search for organics, salts and minerals.
Dr. Cable’s research interests also include ‘weird’ life and prebiotic chemistry. She has performed laboratory experiments to study the liquid hydrocarbon lakes of Titan, a moon of Saturn. She and colleagues were the first to discover a co-crystal, the equivalent of a ‘hydrated mineral’, made exclusively of organics that may exist on Titan’s surface. This work has led to the inception of a new field, Titan ‘petrology’. This work could yield clues to organic reservoirs on Titan that life could potentially exploit.
In addition to biomarker sensor design and the search for ‘weird’ life, Morgan has also explored several extreme environments on Earth that serve as analogs for other places in the solar system, such as Mars. She has been involved in research expeditions to the driest desert in the world (the Atacama Desert) in Chile, the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and fumarole-generated ice caves of the Mount Meager Volcano in Canada. Morgan has also co-led a team of young researchers on multiple expeditions to Iceland to study how life colonizes a fresh lava field. The goal of this work is to inform future Mars sample return missions in terms of sample selection, preservation and analysis.