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There are two types of ice that you find in the solar system.

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There's the crystalline ice that you will find in your freezer,

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but there is also a type of ice called amorphous

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which lacks a regular geometrical pattern for its molecules.

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Amorphous ice is not something you naturally find on Earth

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because the temperatures and pressures are much higher on Earth.

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The way that we make our ice is we use a small evacuated chamber,

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we pump all the air out,

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we have a small metal disk about the size of a quarter

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that we cool down to just a few degrees above absolute zero,

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we flow a gas on top of it, the gas freezes on the metal,

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and we can study the way light reflects off that metal to tell us what the ice is like.

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One of the things that makes our lab unique

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is that we can study cosmic ices when they're exposed to high energy protons

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from a Van de Graff accelerator,

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so we can bombard our ices with protons that have a million volts of energy.

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The data that we measure can be used in order to interpret observations

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that astronomers make of cosmic ices in space.

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Most people would put compounds in liquid water at room temperature

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and study the chemistry like that, but

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we're studying the chemistry in ice at extremely low temperatures.

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Historically people may not have thought that there could be any chemistry at those temperatures.

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We're able to study things in space without leaving the laboratory.

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At NASA we have people who build spacecraft and fly to distant places in the solar system.

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We collaborate with them, and by combining the laboratory work we do with

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the spacecraft work that NASA does so well,

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we're able to actually study the chemical composition

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of things throughout the solar system and in some cases throughout the galaxy.