re: Vostok – here’s some hard science being done by NASA. The arty is on the astrobiology mag. site. (And then there’s the on-going scrum of: the use of terms exo- vs. astrobiology in- and outside the SF realm. More on this in another post).
From the site: NASA’s ENDURANCE robot spent the morning in the repair shop today, after encountering glitches yesterday during its first test in the icy waters of Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin. The goal of the ENDURANCE project is to explore Lake Bonney, an ice-covered lake in Antarctica. That, in turn, will be a step toward a possible future mission to explore the ice-covered ocean of Jupiter’s giant moon Europa….
Full article at:
http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_expedition&task=detail&id=2618