Morgan Cable

Background

About Morgan Cable

Dr. Morgan Cable is a Research Scientist and Acting PI of the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) Instrument aboard the Mars 2020 (Perseverance) rover at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2010, where she designed lanthanide-based receptor sites for the detection of bacterial spores (the toughest form of life) in extreme environments. She has served as a Project Science Systems Engineer on the Cassini Mission, is currently a Co-Investigator of the Dragonfly Mission, a rotorcraft that will explore the surface of Titan, and is performing multiple roles on the Europa Clipper Mission, including serving as Co-Lead of the Habitability Assessment Board (HAB). Dr. Cable is also the PI of the Enceladus Multiorbit Biosignature Encounter and Retrieval (EMBER) mission concept for New Frontiers 5. She previously served as the Science Lead for the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) concept, 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, through both in situ and remote sensing techniques. She has developed novel protocols to analyze organic molecules using small, portable microfluidic sensors, and currently performs laboratory experiments to study the unique organic chemistry of Titan. She and colleagues were the first to discover minerals made exclusively of organics that may exist on Titan’s surface. Morgan also conducts fieldwork in extreme environments on Earth, searching for life and interesting chemistry in places such as the Atacama Desert, ice fields at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro, nutrient-limited lakes at the base of Wind Cave (the densest cave system in the world) in South Dakota, fumarole-generated ice caves of the Mount Meager Volcano in Canada, cold-water CO2 geyser systems in Utah, and lava fields of Iceland. Morgan hails from Cape Canaveral, Florida, where she gained an early love of planetary science watching rockets launch into orbit. She enjoys surfing, soccer, flying Cessna 172s, caving, mountain unicycling and teaching at a space camp in Seoul, Korea. She aspires to continue to discover more about the universe and our place in it.