well, it s been buried for somewhere between 15 and 34 million years, that s a long time. jon: yeah. the russians have been pulling up these core samples. why has it been so difficult to do this? i mean, we ve known how to drill deep for a long time. well work the reasons. one, they didn t want to contaminate the lake, so they didn t want to get any of the drilling fluid into this pristine lake. the other thing is, it s the ice is really warm, and it freezes things up really quickly, so it was hard. jon: all right. so they drill down, they finally have reached the water that is not solidified, not frozen. what are they hoping to learn, what are you hoping to learn from that water? well, i hope they re going to learn what can actually live in these environments underneath two miles of ice, because it s kind of like the environment in outer space, like in the moons that spin around sat turn and jupiter. jon: so there are indications of microbial life in this water? well, we have
smoke detectors, memory foam, the dust buster, which came about because astronauts need ood small drill to extract core samples on the moon. in the medical field nasa helped improve mri scanning, better systems for detecting breast cancer and infrared thermometers. nasa is also credited with helping to create hundreds of other products and technologies from self-riding life rafts to the speedo swimsuit that helped michael phelps break the kind of records in the 2008 summer games. nasa can t rest on its past, the president s words today came at a critical juncture. even as the discovery orbits 200 miles above our heads, we know the space shuttle program is ending and soon. that means nasa has to find a new direction that still let s the agency reach over the horizon and toward the stars. brian wilson is at ksc tonight on the space coast. hey, brian. hey, shepard. you know, many here on the space coast were hoping the president would come here today and lay