Inside a featureless concrete building I tucked away on the sprawling site of NASA's Ames Research Center south of San Francisco, Ralph Lorenz is making weird waves. He is summoning up lines of tiny breakers in a small tank, a Californian beach in miniature, except that his waves are aliens -replicas of slow-moving giants that march across a hydrocarbon sea on a freezing world over a billion kilometres away. Lorenz is a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson. In a wind tunnel inside a huge vacuum chamber, his team is trying to recreate the strange swell expected of lakes or seas on some of our nearest celestial neighbours. What they discover could give insights into how these worlds have evolved, and explain a variety of puzzling geological features. The experiments might even help pin down the most promising spots to search for life. Alternatively, Lorenz might simply discover the best surf in the solar system.
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