Mar. 4, 2013 Behind locked doors, in a lab built like a bomb
shelter, Perry Gerakines makes something ordinary yet truly
alien: ice. This isn't the ice of snowflakes or ice cubes. No,
this ice needs such intense cold and low pressure to form that
the right conditions rarely, if ever, occur naturally on Earth.
And when Gerakines makes the ice, he must keep the layer so
microscopically thin it is dwarfed by a grain of pollen. These
ultrathin layers turn out to be perfect for recreating some of
the key chemistry that takes place in space. In these tiny test
tubes, Gerakines and his colleagues in the Cosmic Ice Lab at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., can
reproduce reactions in ice from almost any time and place in the
history of the solar system, including some that might help
explain the origin of life. "This is not the chemistry people
remember from high school," says Reggie Hudson, who heads the
Cosmic Ice Lab. "This is chemistry in the extreme: bitter cold,
harsh radiation and nearly non-