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Showing Articles for: Life on Mars Total Articles: 541 Newest: Jun 14, 2013 |
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John Priscu knows that microbes can live in the toughest environments, including two miles below the Antarctic ice in one of the coldest, deepest and darkest points on Earth. If life can thrive down there, Priscu believes, then chances are good that it can also thrive on the dry, cold surface of Mars. Priscu's ongoing study of the Vostok ice in Antarctica has earned him a spot on a National Research Council that is looking for ways to prevent the contamination of Mars due to human exploration.
The information coming in from the Mars rovers is exciting for NASA, but it's ending some of the action for bookies in Britain. The bookmaking firm Ladbrokes announced it's stopped taking bets on the question of whether there was ever life on Mars.
If the very high sulfur content found at the Opportunity landing site points to its aqueous history, then what speculative biology could take advantage of brewing sulfur with water. According to one Mars' veteran, there are fascinating extreme microbes that can make good use of these chemical combinations.
NASA scientists said Tuesday that the roving robot Opportunity has found evidence that water once soaked the planet Mars. Liquid water is the one absolute requirement for life on Earth. Although the discovery does not mean the evidence of life on Mars has been found, it suggests that life could have evolved there at one point just as it did on Earth.
Mars rover Opportunity has found evidence that the Red Planet was once wet enough for life to exist there, but the robot has not found any direct traces of living organisms, NASA scientists announced Tuesday. "Opportunity has landed in an area of Mars where liquid water once drenched the surface," said Edward Weiler, associate NASA administrator for space science, at a news conference. "This area would have been a good, habitable environment."
After a weekend of escalating buzz, NASA has scheduled a rush news conference at 2 p.m. ET Tuesday at its Washington headquarters to announce dramatic new findings about water on Mars. The specifics are being held back for the briefing, but clearly they have to do with evidence sent back from the Mars rovers relating to the role liquid water played and may still be playing on the Red Planet. If there is even a bit of salty liquid water beneath the surface of Mars, as hinted last month, that theoretically could open the way for life to exist there even today.
Evidence that suggests Mars was once a water-rich world is mounting as scientists scrutinize data from the Mars Exploration rover, Opportunity, busily at work in a small crater at Meridiani Planum. That information may well be leading to a biological bombshell of a finding that the red planet has been, and could well be now, an extraterrestrial home for life. There is a palpable buzz here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California that something wonderful is about to happen in the exploration of Mars.
A saddleback ridge and two gentle peaks the color of rust rise from a rough, rock-strewn plain. The soil is a powder dotted with gray and salmon pebbles. Every footfall raises tiny puffs of dust and leaves a sharp-edged track. The piercing blue sky extends in an unbroken arc; the wind howls and tastes of salt. Everywhere I look is utter desolation, without a trace of any living thing - just stone, sand, and sky. It could be a picture from Spirit, Pathfinder, or Viking. It could be Mars. Indeed, that's why a couple dozen scientists are now scattered across the hillside.
Before humans can leave their boot prints on the dusty surface of Mars, many questions have to be answered and many problems solved. One of the most fundamental questions one that has intrigued humankind for centuries is whether life has ever existed on Mars, the most Earthlike of all the planets.
As NASAs rovers journey across Marss surface and new satellites orbit the planet, a wealth of information on the red planet is now available to the public, said astronomer and author Kenneth Croswell. Croswell spoke at this semesters first installment of Saturday Morning Physics, a lecture series hosted by the Universitys Physics Department. More than 350 people filled two auditoriums in the Dennison Building for the talk a typical turnout for Saturday Morning Physics, said coordinator and physics Prof. Timothy McKay. Croswell presented material from his new book, Magnificent Mars.
Mars has a long history of being misinterpreted, from conjurings of apparent canals that signaled an alien civilization to the infamous NASA photo of a supposed giant face. Now a close-up picture of tiny spheres embedded in a Martian rock has some people seeing fossilized life. This alternate, perhaps hopeful view of a picture taken by NASA's Opportunity Rover and released Monday has been expressed in e-mail messages to reporters and geologists. Mission scientists anticipated it and were ready yesterday with a response.
Andrew Knoll is a member of the Mars Exploration Rover science team and Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University. His research focuses on ancient rocks on Earth; he studies how well they preserve evidence of ancient terrestrial life. Shortly after Opportunity landed on Mars, Astrobiology Magazine's Editor-in-Chief, Henry Bortman, spoke with Knoll about the scientific potential of the Opportunity landing site. In this interview segment, Knoll discusses how iron deposits near the Rio Tinto in Spain could help scientists understand the history of the hematite deposits on Mars. In the second segment, Knoll will discuss the possibility that Opportunity could find signs of life.
In the first triumph of a field dubbed "environmental genomics," scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with the Joint Genome Institute, have for the first time sequenced the genomes of the most abundant members of a community of organisms - not one at a time, but simultaneously. The researchers took a simple community of microbes from a pink slick on the floor of an abandoned mine, ground them up, and shotgun sequenced the lot. As they put the pieces of DNA back together, the snippets fell easily into five distinct genomes, four of them unknown until now.
As the first explorers pushed into the interior of the New World, they found native populations reeling from diseases never seen in the Americas. The bugs got there first. Leapfrogging ahead of the Europeans, the microbes carrying smallpox, measles and other diseases had decimated communities that had no natural immunity to them. Now, on a more distant new world, the bugs have done it again -- across 50 million miles of interplanetary space. Decades will pass before the first humans set foot on Mars. But they won't be the first Earthlings to land there.
Little green men, or microscopic blobs? For centuries, the prospect of life on Mars has brought the most lethargic imaginations to the boil, and driven scientists to a frenzy of speculation. But a team of University of Toronto physicists, working with other Canadian and American experts, hopes its landmark research mission will be among the first to answer the interplanetary riddle, and deliver new information that will pave the way for the great race to the Red Planet.
The United Nations said on Sunday rules were needed to prevent a free-for-all search for unique Antarctic organisms that can be used for pharmaceutical and other commercial purposes. "Bioprospectors are starting to turn their attention to many of the world's last frontiers, such as hydrothermal vents, the deep seabed, the water column of the high seas and polar ice caps," said a report by UN University, headquartered in Tokyo.
The Martians are not coming - they've probably already arrived on earth. And we could be their descendants. Two Australian scientists have developed new technology to confirm claims by NASA that a meteorite from Mars found in Antarctica in 1984 contained microscopic fossils from the red planet. Biophysicist Dr Tony Taylor from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) in Sydney and the University of Queensland's Professor John Barry devised a new technique which they say affirms the Martian microbe theory "beyond reasonable doubt".
The American space agency NASA has been accused of doctoring its pictures of Mars to make the Martian surface conform to our impression of the Red Planet. NASA, it is claimed, digitally "tweaked" drab brown scenery to make it redder, and removed green patches to hide evidence of life. Most of the pictures have been taken through green, blue and infra-red filters instead of green, blue and standard red filters, which would have produced more accurate colours. The infra-red filters over-emphasised the redness of the planet, turning blue objects a deep burgundy red or, in some cases, a hot pink, while greens appeared a dirty mustard yellow.
Life on Mars probably existed before life started on Earth. Scientists say a new analysis of a meteorite that plummeted to Antarctica in 1984 has confirmed NASA's theory that life once existed on Mars. In 1996, NASA announced it had found microscopic fossils of primitive bacteria-like organisms in meteorite ALH84001 that landed in Antarctica. Scientists have debated NASA's findings and whether the organisms were biological or Martian.
Australian scientists claim to have conclusive proof that unusual microscopic fossils found in a four billion-year-old meteorite from Antarctica are bacterial life from Mars. And in an extraordinary piece of research to be published today, they claim that the find makes it probable that life on Earth first began on Mars.
The answer to one of the most profound questions confronting humanity might have been found in the murky depths of a water trap at a bayside golf course. Great philosophers have spent millennia knitting their brows about whether we are alone in the universe. It now seems they should have been looking at hole nine of the Howestern golf course in Birkdale. Former University of Queensland microbiologist Tony Taylor revealed yesterday he had uncovered cast-iron (or should that be five iron) evidence that magnetic crystals found inside a Martian meteorite matched those in bacteria.
History may record that a dog named Tamarind helped confirm there was once life on Mars. While five space probes - including two robot rovers - explore the red planet, a Sydney scientist's pet dingo-kelpie cross may have found the evidence so many have been seeking.
The American space agency NASA has been accused of doctoring its pictures of Mars to make the Martian surface conform to our impression of the famously red planet. Nasa has been accused of digitally "tweaking" drab brown scenery to make it redder. It has even been suggested that Nasa removed green patches to hide evidence of life.
Among those primordial elements critical for life, water has been considered the one in short supply on Mars. But even as scientists adopt the theme to 'follow the water', another element, geothermal heat, may offer interesting exploration opportunities. Astrobiology Magazine interviewed Buffalo volcanologist, Tracy Gregg, about landing on a martian volcano.
It may only be a thin blue line on the red planet, but it is set to spark a debate about life as we know it. The European Space Agency's unmanned spacecraft Mars Express has discovered evidence of frozen water at the planet's south pole, backing NASA findings made in 2002. If the planet does hold water, the possibility of extraterrestrial life, past or present, may also become more than just science fiction.
Pictures from Nasas roving Mars buggy have astonished scientists by indicating that it may have landed in mud. Strange marks near the Spirit rovers landing site suggest that against all the odds there be might liquid water on or just beneath the surface of Mars. The water would have to be very salty to avoid freezing or evaporating in the harsh Martian conditions. If the scientists suspicions are confirmed it would be the clearest sign yet that lakes and oceans once existed on Mars, and greatly increase the chances of life.
Scientists are puzzled about a patch of soil near the Mars rover Spirit lander that they now call "Magic Carpet". The intrigue has been stirred up by how soil behaved when the landers airbags scraped across the martian soil. That soil appears to have been peeled away. This odd performance of the soil, some speculate, could provide a window into the existence of subsurface water and, maybe, clues about whether Mars could sustain life.
A team of scientists from LSU, NASA, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and other research organizations has discovered an area of Earth that is shockingly similar to the surface of Mars. This joint research effort has discovered clues from one of Earth's driest deserts about the limits of life on this planet, and why past missions to Mars may have failed to detect life. The results of the group's study were published this week in Science magazine, in an article titled "Mars-like Soils in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the Dry Limit of Microbial Life."
As NASA prepares to set twin robots loose on the Martian surface and makes plans to send another in 2007, the agency's long term goal is clear: Determine whether the red planet does or ever did harbor life. But the current search for life is necessarily limited to life as we know it, organisms dependent on liquid water. A SPACE.com reader recently suggested that "we as humans are arrogant, simply believing that any other form of life will be just like us."
A team of scientists has discovered bacteria in a hole drilled more than 4,000 feet deep in volcanic rock on the island of Hawaii near Hilo, in an environment they say could be analogous to conditions on Mars and other planets. Bacteria are being discovered in some of Earth's most inhospitable places, from miles below the ocean's surface to deep within Arctic glaciers. The latest discovery is one of the deepest drill holes in which scientists have discovered living organisms encased within volcanic rock, said Martin R. Fisk, a professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University.
A team of scientists has discovered bacteria in a hole drilled more than 4,000 feet deep in volcanic rock on the island of Hawaii near Hilo, in an environment they say could be analogous to conditions on Mars and other planets. Bacteria are being discovered in some of Earth's most inhospitable places, from miles below the ocean's surface to deep within Arctic glaciers. The latest discovery is one of the deepest drill holes in which scientists have discovered living organisms encased within volcanic rock, said Martin R. Fisk, a professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. Results of the study were published in the December issue of Geochemistry, Geophysics and Geosystems, a journal published by the American Geophysical Union and the Geochemical Society.
The possibility of aliens being found on Mars is now 100 times more likely than Wolves winning the Premiership, according to odds from a leading bookmaker. Space probe Beagle 2's attempted landing on Mars has sparked a rush of interest in extraterrestrial life bets, William Hill confirms. The company has cut the odds that proof of the current existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life will be confirmed before the end of 2004 from 500-1 to 100-1.
Mars passed closer to Earth this summer than it had in thousands of years, and now three emissaries from Earth are about to repay the neighborliness and then some. They are set to descend on the planet, and stay. The three visiting spacecraft, two of them carrying robotic roving vehicles, will be searching the Martian surface for signs of life or conditions conducive to life, at least in the distant past. Their quest is the latest scientific response to an abiding human fascination about the world next-door, a place cold and arid but sufficiently Earthlike to inspire visions of extraterrestrial life.
Bookmakers today cut the odds on Beagle 2 finding signs of life on Mars. The odds were cut by Ladbrokes from 33-1 to 25-1 after a number of bets were placed as the British probe neared its Christmas Day landing. Ladbrokes spokesman Warren Lush said: These odds obviously dont represent the true odds on finding life on Mars but we have shortened our price from 33-1 to 25-1 because we have liabilities of hundreds of thousands of pounds on the bet. We first took money for life on Mars back in 1969 and would be looking at a black hole in our accounts if the Beagle mission discovers something.
The prospect of life on Mars has charged the public imagination for more than a century, ever since astronomers first spied what they thought were canals dug to irrigate the planets ruddy surface. But after spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes began taking a closer look at the planet, evidence of the canals and the Martians who presumably created them quickly vanished.
Early Christmas morning, a small armada of exploratory spacecraft will reach the red planet, some attempting to enter orbit, others to land -- a very risky business because of the engineering and physical challenges that await the robotic probes. Together, they represent one of the most ambitious efforts yet to resolve the contradictions that persist in alternately intriguing and beguiling scientists.
Biologists from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research have demonstrated that desert dust promotes the growth of algae. Scientists had already assumed that the iron in desert dust stimulated algal growth, but this has now been demonstrated for the first time. The researchers have published their findings in the December issue of the Journal of Phycology. The biologists cultured two species of diatoms in seawater originating from the iron-depleted Southern Ocean, the sea around the South Pole. The algae were supplied with dust from a desert in Mauritania and a desert in Namibia. The growth of algae which received a lot of dust was compared with that of algae which received little or no dust.
Friday, scientists are set to unleash a robotic "hound," dubbed Beagle 2, from its mother ship to hunt a tiny piece of Mars for the geochemical scent of past - and perhaps present - life. Beagle 2's release from its mother ship - the Mars Express orbiter - will represent a milestone in an unprecedented international exploration of the red planet over the next month and a half.
The British-led Beagle 2 probe is about to enter the last, and most risky, stage of its six-month-long, 250-million-mile journey. Robert Matthews meets Professor Colin Pillinger, the driving force behind the mission to the Red Planet Professor Colin Pillinger is not remotely superstitious. Even so, as the driving force behind Beagle 2, Britain's first mission to Mars, he knows all about the curse of the Red Planet - about how it took the Cold War superpowers seven attempts to get their first probe anywhere near it, and how two thirds of those sent since have failed to complete their missions.
A bacterium that can remove uranium contamination from groundwater may also be able to generate electricity, U.S. researchers said Thursday. Scientists who deciphered the gene map of Geobacter sulfurreducens say it has more than 100 genes that should enable it to make chemical changes in metals that would generate electricity.
Astronomers may have shown how microbes from Earth could be spread throughout the galaxy taking life to other worlds. Scientists at Armagh Observatory and Cardiff University say bacteria could get into space on rocks blasted off the planet by an asteroid or comet impact.
Four Bay Area scientists just got back from exploring one of the highest lakes on Earth -- a frigid, emerald-green jewel 19,400 feet up in the crater of Licancabur volcano in Bolivia. Their goal: To see how life might survive in an environment so harsh that it may be the closest thing on the planet to conditions on Mars.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Associate has selected professor Janok P. Bhattacharya to join a panel of scientists developing a science plan for a proposed mission to Mars in 2013. He was appointed to the Mars Astrobiology Field Lab Mission Definition Science Steering Group co-chaired by Dave Beaty of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Andrew Steele of the Carnegie Institution.
While Mars can claim some unique features - the largest volcano and the deepest canyon in the solar system - its rocky, dusty, cold landscape has yet to yield signs of the ultimate prize: life. Three simple words - follow the water - have become the mantra of astrobiologists studying the Red Planet because the presence of water is believed to be a prerequisite for life, either past or present. But as scientists look for evidence of water on Mars, they are faced with an underlying dilemma: Will they know life when they see it?
An associate professor in the geosciences department at The University of Texas at Dallas has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to help develop a science plan for a 2013 mission to search for life on Mars.
Life is a bit different in space, even for microbes. Research shows that the pattern of gene activity in some microbes differs in weightlessness, leading to differences in behavior. These differences could be behind a curious observation: the common food-borne pathogen salmonella becomes more virulent when grown in a form of simulated microgravity.
The soft-landing Viking missions to Mars offered a challenging set of experiments to test for biological activity in 1976. As biology has progressed in the ensuing quarter-century, one of the principal investigators continues to mull over what that mission sought to test. In preparation for the three planned missions in the next month and half, those results are revisited.
In a little over one month, the British built Beagle 2 exobiology lander will look for signs of extinct or extant life on the surface of Mars. Not since NASA's Viking mission 27 years ago has another search for life on Mars been attempted.
A team of scientists from NASA, the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Louisiana State University and several other research organizations has discovered clues from one of Earth's driest deserts about the limits of life on Earth, and why past missions to Mars may have failed to detect life.
Mankind's search for alien life could be jeopardised by ultra-resilient bacteria from Earth. David Derbyshire reports What was the most important discovery of the Apollo programme? Some have argued that it was the rocks that explained how the Moon was formed. Others believe it was the technological spin-offs. But according to Captain Peter Conrad, who led the 1969 Apollo 12 mission, it was life.
Scientists say one of the Earth's most inhospitable corners has soil very similar to that on Mars. The arid and almost lifeless Atacama desert in Chile could help researchers design better experiments for detecting Martian life. An international research team headed by Rafael Navarro-Gonzales of the University of Mexico compared findings from soils in the Atacama with results of similar tests from the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s.
A team of scientists is making its way to a lake at the top of the world where, despite blasting solar radiation and little protection from atmospheric ozone, life took hold and continues to thrive today. Licancabur, a dormant volcano rising 20,000 feet above sea level, is not your typical tourist spot. Atmospheric pressure at Licancabur's peak is less than half that at sea level and its equatorial location between Chile and Bolivia puts it directly in the line of fire for ultraviolet blasts from the sun.
Science backed up religion this week in a study that suggests life may have indeed sprung from clay -- just as many faiths teach. A team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston said they had shown materials in clay were key to some of the initial processes in forming life.
Scientists from NASA, the SETI Institute and other institutions will study microscopic life forms in some of the highest lakes on Earth atop a South American volcano to learn what life may have been like on early Mars. From Oct. 27 to Nov. 23, scientists will conduct field tests to examine life forms in several lakes, including the Licancabur volcano crater lake, at nearly 20,000 ft. in the Andean Altiplano on the border of Bolivia and Chile.
Iron lungs may be the answer. To the problem of nuclear pollution, the demand for new energy sources, the mystery of Earth's earliest life, and the search for life in space. A family of tiny iron-breathing critters discovered by Derek Lovley, professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is redefining what scientists have believed possible in all these areas.
Life on other planets is always going to be an exciting subject for debate. But how do we find out if life really exists elsewhere in the Universe? One way is to travel to the planets, either with remotely operated probes or with manned spacecraft.
A new UK project could help detect evidence of life on Mars and improve our understanding of how life evolved on Earth. The aim is to develop a technique that can identify biomolecules in water that have been trapped in rocks for millions to billions of years.
Drilling five-hundred feet into a Spanish red river (Rio Tinto), astrobiologists from the US and Spain are developing techniques to look for underground life forms. The highly acidic, wine-colored river is inhospitable to most microbes except the most robust that can live off the iron and sulfur minerals which give Rio Tinto its unusual tint.
Scientists usually focus on the destructive nature of asteroids and comets slamming into Earth. But maybe the heavenly bodies were the start of something big. ANNE McILROY delves into research that accentuates the positive.
The recent discovery of abundant water on Mars, albeit in the form of permafrost, has raised hopes for finding traces of life there. The Red Planet has long been a favorite location for those speculating about extraterrestrial life, especially since the 1890s, when H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds and the American astronomer Percival Lowell claimed that he could see artificial canals etched into the planet's parched surface. Today, of course, scientists expect to find no more than simple bacteria dwelling deep underground, if even that. Still, the discovery of just a single bacterium somewhere beyond Earth would force us to revise our understanding of who we are and where we fit into the cosmic scheme of things, throwing us into a deep spiritual identity crisis that would be every bit as dramatic as the one Copernicus brought about in the early 1500s, when he asserted that Earth was not at the center of the universe.
Mars was cold - very cold, says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center. But that doesn't mean it was incapable of supporting life. McKay has extensively studied life in some of the harshest environments in the world: the Antarctic dry valleys, the Arctic, and the Atacama desert. In part two of this series, he discusses the frozen dust and why one might want to look closer at the red planet.
To develop techniques to drill into the surface of Mars to look for signs of life, NASA and Spanish scientists recently began drilling 150 meters (495 feet) into the ground near the source of the waters of the Rio Tinto, a river in southwestern Spain, part of a three-year effort that will include the search for underground life forms. During the Mars Analog Research and Technology Experiment (MARTE), scientists and engineers from NASA, U.S. universities and the Spanish Centro De Astrobiologa (Center for Astrobiology) hope to show how robot systems could look for life below Mars' surface. Scientists believe that liquid water may exist deep underground on Mars.
Mars has a case of the munchies. That is, the red planet is spotted with vegetation with some sort of life feasting on the foliage. So says Arthur Clarke, the noted sci-fi writer and space visionary, making the claim during a recent conference on the space elevator. Clarke was keynote speaker at the 2nd annual international conference on the space elevator, held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Sir Arthur beamed into the gathering by satellite link on September 13.
If life exists on Mars, how would we know? Scientists have been grappling with this deceptively simple question for years. Kenneth Nealson, the Wrigley Professor of Geobiology at the University of Southern California, is a leading authority on this issue, which he will address in a public lecture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on Thursday, October 16.
NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View said Tuesday it has picked the University of California for a competitive $330 million, 10-year contract that will enable the space agency to harness some of the top scientific minds in the UC system. The contract taps UC Santa Cruz to manage the development of a University Affiliated Research Center whose work will focus on interdisciplinary research in astrobiology and informational technology and its fusion with nanotechnology and biotechnology.
Early Mars was cold - very cold, says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center. But that doesn't mean it was incapable of supporting life. McKay has extensively studied life in some of the harshest environments in the world: the Antarctic dry valleys, the Arctic, and the Atacama desert.
The European exo/astrobiology network association and the Spanish astrobiological centre are jointly organising a workshop addressing the possibility of life on Mars, to take place from 18 to 20 November in Madrid, Spain.
Martian biology is likely alive and well on the red planet, but tucked away in caves or dwelling underground, sustained by pockets of water. That prospect has spurred scientists to look for exotic life forms here on Earth, far from the maddening crowd of topside biota that covers our planet. This quizzical quarry for life is helping devise the strategies, the tools, and the procedures for unearthing the biological leftovers from an ancient Mars, or hardy microbes that might exist on that distant world today. Experts on the search for underground Martian biology took part in the Sixth International Mars Society Conference, held August 14-17, 2003.
The planet Mars may well have been the scene of the solar system's "second genesis," where forms of life vastly different from Earth's emerged deep beneath the Martian surface billions of years ago, a leading space scientist proposed Wednesday. Christopher McKay, of NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, said that life on early Mars might have been based on DNA, genes and proteins unlike anything found on Earth.
Data from an unmanned Mars probe suggests the red planet's rusty color might have come not from water as widely believed but from tiny meteors raining on its surface, a science magazine said on Wednesday. Scientists exploring the possibility of some form of life existing on Earth's planetary neighbor are eager to establish whether water exists or has existed on Mars and, if so, in what quantities. The New Scientist magazine quoted Albert Yen of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as saying information from the 1996-97 Pathfinder mission suggested the hue came from meteors and dust containing iron and magnesium.
A team of researchers from the University of Arkansas has measured water evaporation rates under Mars-like conditions, and their findings favor the presence of surface water on the planet. Water on the planets surface makes the existence of past or present life on Mars a little more likely, according to the group.
On 27 August, the distance between Mars and the Earth was less than 56 million kilometres, the closest the Red Planet has been to ours for more than 60,000 years. Stargazers and amateur astronomers were treated to views of Mars unrivalled since Neanderthal times, with the distinctive red-orange planet easily visible to the naked eye. Scientists have also taken advantage of the planetary close encounter to record their own observations.
With Mars at its closest position to Earth in 60,000 years, most Red Planet enthusiasts have their eyes trained on the night sky. Some scientists from Central Washington University have turned their attention elsewhere to Soap Lake. As part of an $840,000 study funded by the National Sciences Foundation, the team from Central Washington was on the desolate lake Friday collecting samples of green and brown slime, murky water, tiny plankton and worms. They were searching for the type of life that might have existed on Mars.
Mars 2. Mars 3. Mars 6. Viking 1. Viking 2. Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner. Mars Polar Lander. Deep Space 2. All these spacecraft have landedor crash-landedon Mars since the early 1970s. In a few months, they will be joined by Spirit, Opportunity, and Beagle 2. All have brought scientific instruments seeking to understand the nature of planet Mars, and if the planet once or currently harbors life. They also all brought with them terrestrial bacteria.
Small amounts of carbonate minerals have been discovered on the surface of Mars for the first time. The result could help researchers better understand the history and evolution of the planet as part of their efforts to determine if the conditions for sustaining life ever existed there. Joshua Bandfield and colleagues at Arizona State University discovered that particles on the surface of Mars reflect and absorb infrared radiation in a way that exactly matches that of magnesium-rich carbonates found on Earth (J Bandfield et al. 2003 Sciencexpress to be published).
Scans of the surface of Mars have turned up clues about the Red Planet's atmosphere and suggest Mars has always been a cold, barren place, U.S. scientists said on Thursday. Using the Thermal Emission Spectrometer on NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, geologist Philip Christensen of Arizona State University and his colleagues looked for minerals known as carbonate compounds. The compounds provide clues about Mars's past because they form when carbon dioxide gas comes in contact with minerals and water.
New Mexico Tech Professor Philip Kyle, who is a leading expert on Mount Erebus in Antarctica, is helping an Australian geologist look for life on Mars. Kyle, who has traveled to Antarctica every year for the last 32 years to study Mount Erebus, was approached recently about his work on ice towers, because the geologist, Nick Hoffman, had seen the latest images taken by the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which revealed hotspots in the Hellis Basin that could be similar to ice towers in Antarctica, where microbiological life forms live on chemical energy.
A microbe that thrives in boiling water and breathes iron has stretched the limits of where scientists believed life could exist, according to a report published on Thursday.
Even on the present-day cold and dusty surface of Mars, liquid water may be sustaining a world of Martian microbes. Data churned out by NASA's Mars Odyssey suggests that the nearby planet is waterfront property -- at least in the form of below surface deposits of water ice. Odyssey scientists report that the soil very close to the surface over much of the planet contains large amounts of ice. Now a father and son science team argue that ice near Mars' surface means liquid water in its "topsoil", thereby strengthening the case for life on the red planet.
Giant ice towers that formed next to steaming volcanic vents in the freezing atmosphere of Mars may be the best place to look for life on the red planet, an Australian geologist said on Monday. Nick Hoffman of the University of Melbourne said the latest images taken by the Mars Odyssey orbiter had revealed curious hotspots in the Hellas Basin that could be similar to ice towers in Antarctica, where microbial life forms live on chemical energy.
They thrive without oxygen, growing in salty, alkaline conditions, and may offer insights into what kinds of life might survive on Mars. They're a new species of organism, isolated by scientists at the National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Alabama.
A study of springs and ice-covered lakes in Canada's High Arctic could help point scientists to life on Mars. Researchers from McGill University have been studying the aquatic environments at Expedition Fiord on Axel Heiberg island. The area contains the most northerly perennial springs in Canada. Nancy Martineau says these springs maintain a temperature of about 5 C all year despite winter air temperatures that dip below -40 C.
Mark Twain didn't think much of California's Mono Lake. "It lies in a lifeless, treeless, hideous desert," he wrote in his 1872 travelogue, Roughing It. "This solemn, silent, sailless sea--this lonely tenant of the loneliest spot on earth--is little graced with the picturesque." Astrobiologist Richard Hoover of NASA's National Space Science and Technology Center (NSSTC) in Huntsville, Alabama, has a different view: "It's beautiful," he says.
Spherix Incorporated (NASDAQ/SPEX), today reported that recent data on the Martian surface sent by the Odyssey spacecraft will be interpreted as evidence for liquid water, life's most essential need, in a paper to be presented at the Astrobiology session of the SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering) meeting in San Diego on August 4. This is the latest, perhaps most compelling, round in the years'-long fight of the paper's author, Dr. Gilbert V. Levin, a life detection scientist in NASA's 1976 Viking Mission to Mars, to gain support for his conclusion that his experiment had succeeded in detecting microbial life. In his analysis of the data from Odyssey's Neutron Spectrometer, Levin says that the vast quantities of ice it found close to the surface of Mars mean that life-sustaining liquid water was in the soil sampled by his Viking experiment.
The prospect of finding life on Mars is alive and well. Despite its extremely hostile environment, the red planet may indeed be an asylum for microorganisms. That viewpoint is gaining support, thanks to scientists looking for life in a range of extreme conditions right here on planet Earth. Experts that are on the trail of finding life on Mars are taking part this week in the Sixth International Conference on Mars sponsored by the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Lunar and Planetary Institute, NASA, and the Planetary Society.
NASA found evidence of life on Mars in 1976, but dismissed the findings as impossible, two British astronomers claim. Now, evidence from missions such as the Mars Global Surveyor suggests that the early observation was correct after all.
Taking the UT/ORNL marriage to heart, this couple spends quality time descending into some of the world's deepest gold mines as a precursor to the search for life on Mars.
Scientists Hope to Use Horseshoe Crab Blood to Hunt for Life Outside Earth. "One of the reasons the horseshoe crab has survived for so long is its advanced immune system," said Norman Wainwright, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Mass. "This system can be used to find microbial life."
Could life once have existed on planets other than Earth, perhaps on Mars? A team of researchers led by the University of California, Berkeley, has joined the quest to find the answer. The NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) announced this week that UC Berkeley is one of 12 institutions that will receive funding to study the origin, evolution and future of life in the universe. The institute is awarding the UC Berkeley-led team $1.23 million for the first year of a five-year grant to study the biosphere of Mars, both ancient and recent.
Barely a year ago, Mars Odyssey found signs that the planet has reservoirs of underground ice near the south pole. Scientists at the US space agency (Nasa) estimated there was enough ice to fill Lake Michigan twice. They said it might be merely the tip of the iceberg and it seems they were right. New observations by Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor (another Nasa probe that is mapping Mars) suggest the planet's north pole has about one third more underground ice than the south. Beneath a shallow crust of dry soil, there appears to be a layer of permanently frozen ground that is up to 75% ice.
As Europe and the United States prepare to launch missions to Mars, BBC News Online's Helen Briggs looks at our long-running fascination with the idea of Martian life.
Claims have re-emerged that the US space agency (Nasa) did find signs of life on Mars during the historic Viking landings of 1976. Dr Gil Levin, a former mission scientist, says he now has the evidence to prove it, just days before the US and Europe send new expeditions to the Red Planet. The United States and Russia have spent billions since the 1960s on a handful of space craft designed to land on Mars. Only three have succeeded so far: the two Viking probes in the 1970s and Mars Pathfinder in 1997.
What do NASA's soon-to-be-launched Mars Exploration Rover (MER-1 and MER-2) spacecraft have in common with the Viking and Voyager spacecraft launched decades ago? Besides being interplanetary explorers, they will be among the most biologically clean spacecraft ever launched from Cape Canaveral. Making sure the spacecraft are as biologically clean and contamination-free as possible before they leave Earth is NASA's planetary protection (PP) policy. It protects other solar system bodies from Earth life and protects Earth from extraterrestrial life that may be brought back by returning space missions.
Since the early years of the space program, scientists have expressed concern about planetary protection --that is, the prevention of human-caused biological cross-contamination between Earth and other bodies in the solar system. "Hitchhiker" bacteria and other organisms on spacecraft and equipment might cause irreversible changes in the environments of other planets or interfere with scientific exploration on them. In practical terms, the concerns are twofold: avoiding (1) forward contamination, the transport of terrestrial microbes on outbound spacecraft, and (2) back contamination, the introduction onto Earth of contamination or life-forms that could be returned from space. Both concerns are covered in provision of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, as well as in NASA policies and requirements.
Scientists and engineers with the Mars Analog Research and Technology Experiment (MARTE) recently selected a location near the Rio Tinto river to drill for exotic subsurface life. Representing NASA, numerous U.S. universities, and the Spanish Centro De Astrobiologa (Center for Astrobiology), the group hopes to discover underground bacteria and other microbes that feed on minerals obtained from rocks containing iron and sulfur. Though an Earth biological study, MARTE hopes to provide valuable lessons in the search for life on Mars.
The European Space Agency is soliciting scientists to come up with unique ways of identifying life on Mars. The idea is to put these detection tools on ESA's ExoMars mission, which is set to deposit a rover on the Red Planet in 2009.
Could dormant forms of bacteria called endospores potentially travel from Earth to Mars aboard spacecraft? If so, new experiments suggest that even a dry and cold Mars might not prove so inhospitable, despite the possibility of self-sterilizing and oxidizing martian soil.
Over the decades, a flotilla of Mars spacecraft have relayed back to Earth freeze-frame portraits of a cold, dry, dusty and desolate planet. But Mars experts are becoming progressively more surprised as they observe a world in constant change. Evidence is mounting that the red planet bares witness to very young, water-related features. Mars has undergone episodic climate cycles that have caused dramatic changes to its surface. Some of these climate swings may have been fairly recent as measured in geologic time.
Is there life on Mars? It's possible, but it may not Martian, say scientists. New research, published in the open access journal BMC Microbiology, suggests that conditions on Mars are capable of supporting dormant bacteria, known as endospores. This raises concern about future attempts to detect Martian life forms because endospores originating on Earth could potentially hitch a ride to Mars and survive on its surface.
Are dark spots that appear near the south pole of Mars in early spring, a sign of life on the Red Planet? No one can say for sure, according to a group of scientists who met at ESTEC, ESA's technical center in the Netherlands. Indeed ever since Mars watcher, Percival Lowell, mistook the chiselled images from his telescope as Martian 'canals', a certain skepticism has greeted fresh claims about purely visual evidence of unusual activity on the Red Planet. But as Lowell himself wrote from Flagstaff, Arizona in 1895, there is much more to the Mars habitability question than can be answered astronomically: "If Mars be capable of supporting life, there must be water upon his surface; for, to all forms of life, water is as vital a matter as air. On the question of habitability, therefore, it becomes all-important to know whether there be water on Mars."
Mars is one wet and wild world. Scientists are slowly warming up to the view that trickling amounts of water on the cold, dry planet may be nourishing Martian biology. Thanks to spacecraft observations by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), newly formed dark slope streaks on Mars have been spotted. Emanating from a point source, they widen as they flow down slope. In some cases, they divide into separate streaks as they encounter other surface features. These sharp-edged dark stains always appear on slopes, mostly inside craters and valleys, but also on small hills. They are almost always located below Martian sea level - zero elevation.
Europe is stepping up its plans to search for life on Mars with proposals for a solar-powered robot that would spend months on the Martian surface. The Mars rover would be equipped with a portable lab, a drill, and a system to take soil samples from sites that could contain primitive life forms. The European Space Agency (Esa) is asking scientists to come up with ideas for the 2009 mission.
Are we alone, or is there life beyond Earth? Has life ever existed on Mars? The European Space Agency (ESA) is now offering scientists a rare opportunity to answer these fundamental questions that have intrigued mankind for centuries. In order to determine whether life ever evolved on Mars, ESA intends to launch an exobiology mission, known as ExoMars, to the Red Planet in 2009. As part of ESAs long-term Aurora programme to prepare for future human missions, ExoMars will deploy a high-mobility rover on the Martian surface.
One of NASA's leading planetary scientists and a renowned expert on the possibility of life on Mars, Dr. Christopher P. McKay, will present a lecture at the University of Arkansas at 4 p.m. Tuesday in Giffels Auditorium. Titled "Life on Mars: Past, Present and Future," McKay's presentation will discuss evidence that, early in Mars' history, the planet had liquid water, more active volcanism and thicker atmosphere -- conditions remarkably similar to those of Earth. In fact, Mars exhibited these conditions about 3.5 billion years ago, about the same time that life appeared on our planet.
The quest for life beyond Earth generally revolves around the presence of water, which makes the recent discovery of abundant water just under the surface of Mars so tantalizing, according to NASA scientists. But the latest theory to emerge from pictures taken by the Mars Odyssey satellite orbiting the Red Planet is even more astounding: NASA researchers now believe there is a possibility that snow may have fallen on the surface in the geologically recent past.
New images and analysis suggest the slopes around the Red Planet's largest extinct volcano, Olympus Mons, contain dark stains caused by brine flowing down hill. The discovery indicates that the substantial underground ice deposits on Mars can sometimes melt and flow across the surface. It is bound to increase speculation that life may exist near to the surface of the planet.
Efforts to explore Mars - a planet that has captivated the human imagination for millenniums - represent one of the few bright spots in a space program overshadowed by the loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew last month. Now, US and European scientists are poised for a return to the red planet late this spring in an unprecedented effort to deliver two rovers and a lander to the surface, while a new orbiter takes up station high above to gather stereo images of the planet's surface in extraordinary detail. The projects, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission and the European Space Agency's Mars Express, will help determine whether Mars could once have hosted simple forms of organic life - and whether such forms still may exist there.
Intriguing and often-examined gullies on Mars might not be created by water seeping out from underground springs, according to a new study. Rather, they are likely caused by trickling water from melting snowpacks, an active process that could sustain biology on the Red Planet. A leading Mars scientist has proposed a new theory regarding gully formation on the planet, backed by images taken from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. The research bolsters the view that liquid water is sheltered by snow, preventing the fluid from rapid evaporation in Mars' thin atmosphere.
Simple life forms are turning up in a surprising variety of below-ground environments, potentially making up 50 percent of the Earth's biomass, scientists said today at the AAAS Annual Meeting. From South African gold mines, to cooled seafloor lavas, these subsurface bugs have provided clues to the potential for life on Mars, and the diversity of possible fuel sources for life, including nuclear energy and toxic waste.
Like Earth organisms, Martian organisms would pass gas. So why not use this as a marker for life on the Red Planet? Scientists from George Mason University and the California Institute of Technology suggest we do just that. In a paper in Geophysical Research Letters, the scientists say that bacteria that evolved early in Martian history and then moved underground could be producing detectable methane.
A MELBOURNE geologist believes he's put a dent in NASA's plans to send an expedition to Mars to search for life. University of Melbourne planetary scientist Nick Hoffman has identified gully and channel development near the polar regions of Mars from images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft.
An Australian geologist has identified what could be the first ever active flow of fluids through gullies on Mars. University of Melbourne geologist Dr. Nick Hoffman identified recent gully and channel development near the polar regions of Mars from images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. But contrary to the majority of scientific opinion which suggests that such features were carved by liquid water, Hoffman says the flow is most likely frozen carbon dioxide. NASA is hoping to find signs of liquid water on Mars so it can have a target for the next generation of Mars landers and rovers to go and search for life, but their search could prove fruitless if Hoffman's analysis of the images is correct.
Microbes collected from the edge of space have been brought back to life in the lab. This enabled the high-flying organisms to be identified, almost two years after they were found in air samples collected by a weather balloon cruising at 41,000 metres (135,000 feet) over southern India. How the bugs got there is not known, but there are three possibilities: they were carried up on winds, they sneaked into the samples on Earth or they have flown through space and are aliens making their way down to our planet.
A controversial finding last year of microbes high in Earth's atmosphere and thought to have come from space gained another scientist's support this week. The organisms, collected by a balloon mission to the stratosphere in January 2001, were first studied by Chandra Wickramasinghe of Cardiff University, co-proponent with the late Sir Fred Hoyle of the modern theory of panspermia. The theory states that the Earth was seeded in the past, and is still being seeded, with microorganisms from comets.
In ice that has sealed a salty Antarctic lake for more than 2,800 years, scientists have found frozen bacteria and algae that returned to life after thawing. The research may help in the search for life on Mars, which is thought to have subsurface lakes of ice.
Within ice that covers a salty, liquid Antarctic lake scientists have found and revived microbes that were at least 2,800 years old. The discovery, announced today, points to probable life within the underground lake and suggests the sort of ecosystem that might exist on Mars. The ancient microbes were in a state of suspended metabolism, similar to dormancy, said study team member John Priscu of Montana State University. "They're in a frozen state," Priscu said in a telephone interview. "They'll come back to life if you add water."
Organic bubbles that could serve as dwellings for primitive life have been discovered inside a space rock that fell to Earth nearly three years ago. The frozen chunk of stone and metal was recovered in the Yukon Territory after eyewitnesses saw it's dramatic breakup in the sky. Inside the so-called Tagish Lake meteorite, frozen and well preserved, researchers have now found what they call organic hydrocarbon globules. Similar bubble-like structures have previously been created in laboratories at NASA's Ames Research Center, under conditions designed to simulate how Nature might have cooked up the first life on Earth.
Staggering quantities of water are hidden below the surface of Mars, the latest results from the Odyssey spacecraft suggest. The discovery doesn't alter the Mars' status as a barren wilderness because the water has been locked-up in subterranean ice for millennia, mainly around the planet's poles. But the sheer volume of ice does pertain to the likelihood that life once existed on the planet.
A totally new and highly controversial theory on the origin of life on earth, is set to cause a storm in the science world and has implications for the existence of life on other planets. Research by Professor William Martin of the University of Dusseldorf and Dr Michael Russell of the Scottish Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow, claims that living systems originated from inorganic incubators - small compartments in iron sulphide rocks. The new theory radically departs from existing perceptions of how life developed and it will be published in a forthcoming issue of Philosophical Transactions series B, Chloroplasts and mitochondria: functional genomics and evolution.
In the ongoing battle between the wet and dry-Marsers, competing theories ebb and flow. Robert Cooke reports from New York. A new look at the bumps, basins and flow channels on Mars suggests the red planet, though sometimes awash with water, has been too cold and too dry to ever get life going.
Mars in the popular imagination is a planet that was once warm and wet, a place that might have fostered life. But new research shows how these imagined pleasant periods were brief, hellish, and punctuated by utter catastrophe. New and detailed computer modeling paints a picture of blankets of molten rock, scalding rain and colossal floods more than 3 billion years ago that rapidly and permanently scarred vast regions of the surface following crushing impacts from comets or asteroids.
In the search for life on other planets, one of the most important questions is: "What are we searching for?' Biologists on Earth have traveled to the most inhospitable parts of the planet to find extreme forms of life in hopes of answering that query. A new study from scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Life Detection shows that bacteria living in Death Valley's salt-encrusted mud may hold clues to finding microbes on Mars.
NASA wants to know what the Sudbury crater has to tell scientists about life on Mars. Researchers from the U.S. space agency are probing the most inhospitable places on Earth in the hopes they will find clues about how lifeforms could survive another inhospitable place -- Mars. They are studying how lifeforms adapted to survive in the Siberian permafrost, the arid valleys of Antarctica and a dormant volcano in the Chilean Andes. And they're hoping that Canada's ancient Sudbury crater also has some secrets to reveal.
New Mexico Tech wants to see what happens when bacteria fly. Scientists at the university are testing bacteria-filled rocks to see if the organisms can survive the extreme pressures and temperatures involved in a meteor impact on another planet that might send them to Earth. If the bacteria prove hardy, it might mean that life could be widespread across the universe. "People kind of thought of this as crazy science fiction in the past, until we found this meteorite from Mars and discovered evidence of life in it in the 1990s," said Eileen Ryan, a research scientist at Tech's Magdalena Ridge Observatory Project. "Studying these rocks has implications for how we view ourselves and our place in the universe. It's an exciting idea that we're not alone."
Could life on Earth have spread to other planets? Or the other way around? An idea nearly 140 years old is resurfacing in a new form: microbes surviving space travel inside meteorites. Shielded from the intense radiation of the sun, dried out microbes could survive and sprout on a new world.
Mars may be smaller than Earth, but its still huge to a roving spacecraft that can cover only 100 meters a day. For that reason, Mars mission planners must go to great lengths to find landing sites that might still carry evidence that life once existed on Mars. A key zone of speculation exists just beneath Mars cold, dry, dusty and inhospitable surface where two prerequisites for life, water and heat, may be found. Such heat may come from volcanism, and indeed Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system. Asteroid impacts (most likely in the first half-billion years of the solar system but conceivably even today) are a second possibility.
Kimberly Warren-Rhodes has an eye for microscopic life. But on this day in early October, as she trekked across perhaps the driest spot on Earth, she was having trouble. She couldn't find a thing. A post-doctoral researcher with NASA-Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Warren-Rhodes hunts down hardy bacteria that thrive in climates too harsh for other life. The microbes colonize the underside of white quartz, using the opaque crystal as a "rock greenhouse" to filter the sun's rays and condense scarce moisture. Warren-Rhodes had never found a desert floor without them.
Did life come from Mars? And should it go back? At least the first question will be discussed by Australian physicist Paul Davies in a free public lecture at UC Santa Cruz on Tuesday night. Davies will present the lecture as popular science, so that people can follow the findings without specialized science training. The lecture will take place at the UCSC Sigma Xi and Physics Department in Classroom Unit 2 on the campus, at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
The highest lake in the world is located in this volcano's crater. NASA / SETI / Extremeenvironment.com In the vast wasteland of Chile's Atacama Desert, yearly rainfall is measured in tenths of inches and life is scarce. Yet, rising above its barren landscape, at an elevation of 19,410 feet (5,916 meters), Licancabur Volcano holds an ice-covered crater lake that's teaming with life. At this lake the world's highest the atmospheric pressure is half that at sea level and more dangerous ultraviolet radiation reaches the ground than at lower elevations.
With growing support from the federal government, scientists are accelerating their hunt for life beyond Earth. They also are broadening the search to include organisms unlike any of those on our home planet -- what some researchers call "weird life." By this, they mean alien forms of life that are not based on our familiar DNA but on a different genetic code. In theory, creatures made of unusual biological or chemical structures might exist on moons or planets that lack liquid water, a must for life as we know it.
microbe which is resistant to radiation may have come from Mars, Russian scientists say. The researchers suggest the bug may have begun life on the red planet before being blasted to earth by an asteroid. Deinococcus radiodurans can withstand a thousand times the dose of radiation that would kill a human being. To find out how this resistance was acquired, Anatoli Pavlov and his team from St Petersburg's Ioffe Physico-Technical decided to blast another microbe, E.coli, with gamma rays, according to New Scientist magazine
Comment: Nasa landed two Viking spacecraft on the Martian surface with the specific aim of searching for signs of biological activity. Not so much as a bacterium was found. The surface of Mars appeared to be a freeze-dried desert, utterly hostile to any form of life. Today this pessimistic assessment seems too hasty. I believe not only that Mars has harboured life, but it may actually be the cradle of life. This conclusion arises because of the recent discovery that our biosphere extends deep into the bowels of the Earth. Microbes have been found thriving at depths of several kilometres, inhabiting the pore spaces of apparently solid rock. Genetic studies suggest these deep-living organisms are among the most ancient on the planet. They are, in effect, living fossils.
Water is the liquid that cut the fresh gullies seen on Mars in 2000, suggests a new analysis - this despite claims that other liquids may be responsible. The fleeting presence of water flowing on the Red Planet once again raises hopes that primitive life may exist just below the surface. Looking at ancient canyons and shorelines, most scientists agree that Mars was wetter and warmer billions of years ago. But the fresh gullies would indicate that running water, and perhaps life, may be a feature of Mars today.
Two of the three largest impact craters on Earth have nearly the same size and structure, researchers say, but one was caused by a comet while the other was caused by an asteroid. These surprising results could have implications for where scientists might look for evidence of primitive life on Mars.
A mission from the mid-1970s provides the benchmark. When Nasa sent two robotic Viking landers to Mars, both had been sterilised to a level comparable to the best operating theatre. The rules to be applied to each space mission fall into a discrete set of categories. These reflect scientific knowledge of the nature of the celestial bodies, and the conditions under which life exists on Earth. Thus, Venus is not judged to be in need of phenomenal standards of protection, because its surface temperature of about 500 C is far above that at which any life has been found on Earth, and the chemical bonds necessary for the maintenance of such life break down at about 160 C. Bugs on board a spacecraft sent to land there would soon be killed.
The strange shapes seen in a rock from Mars that some researchers say are fossilised bacteria really are tiny micro organisms, say American researchers. But while they are confident the Mars rock contains fossilised life they cannot quite bring themselves to say it comes from the Red Planet, it might be Earthly contamination. Despite the uncertainty about their origin establishing that the small structures really were living things, and not just mineral globules, would be an advance in a field that has sharply divided opinions.
Neighboring Mars may look dry as a bone, but experts are finding evidence of life-sustaining water hidden below the planet's rugged terrain. The quantities discovered so far by instruments aboard NASA's $300 million Mars Odyssey mission equal twice the volume of Lake Michigan. Suspected for more than three decades, the watery findings compiled by the Odyssey after reaching its destination a year ago are a signpost of life on the Red Planet.
Mix Mars rock, water, and a heat source. What do have? Perhaps a suitable environment to support Martian life. A source of energy to power metabolism has been regarded as a limiting factor if life is to have thrived, or now exists, on the red planet. New research by a team of researchers here at the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) suggests that there's hope in discovering still-alive organisms on Mars.
British-born visionary Arthur C. Clarke's writings inspired satellite communications and influenced President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961, decision to send American explorers to the moon. But his 1968 cinematic collaboration with the late Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, over-optimistically predicted an aggressive human expansion into space.
A hardy microbe that can withstand huge doses of radiation could have evolved this ability on Mars. That is the conclusion of Russian scientists who say it would take far longer than life has existed here for the bug to evolve that ability in Earth's clement conditions. They suggest the harsher environment of Mars makes it a more likely birthplace.
If there is life on Mars, scientists believe it's likely to be tiny organisms that can survive below the planet's surface, without sunlight or oxygen, nourished by the minerals available even in that harsh environment. In other words, said Ricardo Amils Pibernat, a researcher at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, past or present life on the red planet could well resemble the unusual microbes that populate Spain's Rio Tinto. The 58-mile-long river, which flows through one of the world's largest deposits of pyrite, or fool's gold, has a pH similar to that of automobile battery acid and contains virtually no oxygen in its lower depths.
A multitude of arguments supporting the possible existence of life on Mars have surfaced after the discovery and examination of the ALH84001 meteorite. The polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) found within, plus detailed examination of the ratios of certain metabolites, all have various interpretations supporting or opposing their organic origin.
If there is life on Mars, scientists believe it's likely to be tiny organisms that can survive below the planet's surface, without sunlight or oxygen, nourished by the minerals available even in that harsh environment. In other words, says Ricardo Amils Pibernat, a researcher at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, past or present life on the Red Planet could well resemble the unusual microbes that populate Spain's Rio Tinto. The 58-mile-long river, which flows through one of the world's largest deposits of pyrite, or fool's gold, has a pH similar to that of automobile battery acid and contains virtually no oxygen in its lower depths.
A strange and hardy terrestrial microorganism can grow in atmospheric and soil conditions that in some ways resemble those on Mars, suggesting that life could thrive on the red planet, according to scientists. The creatures, known as methanogens, survived in a thin atmosphere of hydrogen and carbon dioxide and in a special brew of volcanic ash altered to simulate the properties of martian soil, including its density, grain size and magnetic properties. The results, in addition to the presence of vast stores of underground water on Mars, lend support to the theory that the planet once hosted or now hosts life, said Tim Kral, a researcher at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
A laboratory experiment simulating conditions on Mars found that certain terrestrial microorganisms called methanogens can survive in extreme Mars-like conditions involving low air pressure. While the work does not by any means suggest there is or ever was life on Mars, it illustrates one possible way primitive organisms might have once thrived on the Red Planet or could even exist below the surface today, according to Tim Kral of the University of Arkansas. Kral led the experiment and presented it to colleagues during a bioastronomy conference in Australia last month.
Using a unique device known as the Andromeda Chamber to simulate conditions found on Mars, University of Arkansas researchers discovered that certain microorganisms called methanogens could grow at low pressures. Their findings imply that life could have existed on the Red Planet in the past, present, or that it could do so at some point in the future. Associate professor of biological sciences Tim Kral presented the preliminary results at a bioastronomy conference in Australia in July. "Our goal is first to get the organisms to grow well, then systematically experiment with conditions found on Mars," said Kral. He and his team first grew test tube cultures of various methanogens in a Mars soil simulant called JSC Mars-1. Derived from altered volcanic ash, it approximates the composition, grain size, density, and magnetic properties of Martian soil.
A quarter of the magnetic material in a famous martian meteorite was most likely created by microbes, insist a team of researchers from the United States and Canada. The claim isn't new, but additional evidence for it is. In the August issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a team of nine researchers headed by Kathie Thomas-Keprta, an astrobiologist at NASA's Johnson Space Center, presents new evidence that at least some of the magnetite crystals in ALH84001 are organic. About 25 percent of the magnetite crystals in ALH84001 have passed a set of criteria that only biological magnetite crystals have ever met before.
In the latest study of a 4.5 billion-year-old Martian meteorite, researchers have presented new evidence confirming that 25 percent of the magnetic material in the meteorite was produced by ancient bacteria on Mars. These latest results were published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The researchers used six physical properties they refer to as the Magnetite Assay for Biogenicity (MAB) to compare all the magnetic material found in the ancient meteorite -- using the MAB as a biosignature. A biosignature is a physical and/or chemical marker of life that does not occur through random processes or human intervention.
When packing for a trip towards another planet, there are some things, such as microorganisms, that you do not want to include in your 'luggage'. For example, what if extraterrestial life is finally detected on Mars, and scientists realise afterwards that such life is actually terrestrial? Fortunately, there are strict international rules to avoid the contamination of Solar System bodies with biological material from Earth. Landers, for example, may present a special danger to the objects they set down on. The European Space Agency (ESA) is well aware of this.
Measurements of the ice temperature far below the South Pole suggest that a so-called "lake" discovered at the base of the ice is most likely permafrost - a frozen mixture of dirt and ice - because the temperature is too low for liquid water. Far from being a disappointment, says a University of California, Berkeley physicist, the permafrost subglacial lake may be ideal for developing and testing sterile drilling techniques needed before scientists attempt to punch through the ice into pristine liquid lakes elsewhere in Antarctica in search of exotic microbes. Techniques that avoid contaminating a drill site with microbes also would prove useful for future drilling into Mars' polar caps in search of life.
More than 100 years ago, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope and saw channels and grooves etched across the surface of Mars. The canali, as he called them in 1877, gave rise to incredible science fiction stories about intelligent aliens having engineered the strange structures. A century later, spacecraft and astronomical probes revealed not the handiwork of Martians, but compelling evidence that vast quantities of water once washed across the surface of Earth's planetary neighbour, carving out deep canyons, channels and coastlines. But the water had long vanished from the now dusty, rusty Martian surface. All that scientists have been able to detect are small amounts of water in the Martian ice caps and a bit wafting around the hazy, pink atmosphere. The missing water has been one of the most perplexing mysteries in planetary science: Was it blasted away by some cosmic disaster? Did it somehow leak out of the Martian atmosphere? Or did it, as scientists are reporting this week, seep underground, remaining there to this day? An international team, using NASA's Odyssey spacecraft, say they have collected compelling evidence that a huge amount of water is locked underground in a Martian version of permafrost. Or "buried treasure," as William Boynton, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, describes it.
NASA specialists made the sensational statement that great quantities of ice have been detected one meter deep under the surface of the red planet. Specialists say that, if the detected ice melted, Marss surface would be covered with a 500-meter layer of water.
Ronald Greeley of Arizona State University will be presenting the Director's Seminar on Monday, May 20, 2002, 11:00am Pacific (12:00pm Mountain, 1:00 Central, 2:00 Eastern). This seminar will outline the key discoveries from past and present exploration and discuss the current plans for the future. The overall strategy for Mars Exploration includes searching (i.e., remote sensing), in situ exploration (e.g., landers/rovers), and sampling (return of materials to Earth), in a continuing, iterative process. The principal goal is to search for evidence of past or present life and to characterize environments conducive for organic evolution. A key aspect of the strategy is the inclusion of Mars Scouts, which are missions led by science Principal Investigators who form a team typically involving NASA centers and aerospace industry for projects that complement the primary missions and provide flexibility to the overall Program. The implementation of the Mars Exploration Program is international, with near-term missions to include NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (2003), Japan's Nozomi orbiter (2003), the European Space Agency Mars Express (2003), NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2005), and the French CNES Premier orbiter and Netlander mission (2007), as well as other potential projects, leading to the eventual return of samples to Earth from well-characterized sites.
When NASA planetary scientist Carol Stoker was preparing a poster paper about her work on developing autonomous intelligence for Mars rovers, little did she know it would land her in the middle of the media's spotlight. But that's just what happened before NASA's second Astrobiology Science Conference, held at Ames Research Center last week. After a brief abstract of her paper was posted on the conference website, an online news article reported that Stoker's research had "found 'intriguing' evidence that may indicate there is life on Mars." It's true that Stoker's abstract used the word "intriguing." However, there is no hint in the abstract nor does Stoker herself make any claim about "evidence that may indicate there is life on Mars."
Hydrogen-producing Earth rocks may hold a key to extraterrestrial life forms. Scientists have long known that hydrogen gas is set free from many common rocks when water infiltrates fresh cracks within them. Primitive bacteria that comprise a subterranean biomass possibly outweighing all living things at Earth's surface thrive on this hydrogen, using it as an energy source. A recent study describes a different hydrogen-producing reaction within the minerals that make up the bulk of certain rocks that were once hot or molten. This latter process could indicate a novel support system for microbes on other planets. Friedemann Freund of NASA's Ames Research Center suspects that similar hydrogen-consuming microbes may exist deep in the rocks on Mars and other planets that contain water today or were once wet.
Huge colonies of Earth microbes are living off of hydrogen gas released by common rocks, raising the possibility of similar life forms on Mars, says a NASA researcher. "The hydrogen comes from a subtle chemical reaction that occurs within rocks that were once hot or even molten," said Friedemann Freund, a physicist, geologist and chemist at NASA's Ames Research Center whose work appears in the current issue of Astrobiology Journal.
When it was announced last month that the Mars Odyssey satellite had found water ice beneath the planet's frozen carbon dioxide south polar ice cap, Dr. Lidija Siller, a physicist from the University of Newcastle, England, felt excited. "I believe that the data I have explains how this water became trapped underneath the surface",she said. Dr. Siller presented the results of her research - which involves studying photochemical reactions in ice - at the Condensed Matter physics conference held April 8, part of the Institute of Physics Congress in Brighton, England.
Chris McKay's album of family photos opens with a picture of fossilized bacteria, entombed within rock billions of years old. "This is one of (my family's) oldest, oldest, oldest ancestors," declares the NASA scientist, showing a slide of the photo and drawing a big laugh from his packed audience. But he's only half joking. The quest for "alien" life forms on the primeval Earth and their possible counterparts on Mars has consumed much of McKay's career at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, he said on the opening day of the space agency's biannual Astrobiology Science Conference.
A story published by the BBC today reported that NASA researchers "have found 'intriguing' new evidence that may indicate there is life on Mars," but a NASA spokesperson told SPACE.com that the claim is overstated. The article, posted on the BBC's Web site, said researcher Carol Stoker, from NASA's Ames Research Center, worked with a team that used photos from the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission to determine that there could be chlorophyll on Mars. The molecule is used by plants to produce energy from sunlight and would be considered a monumental find on the Red Planet.
Primitive bacteria exist in huge numbers deep in the Earth, living on hydrogen gas produced in rocks, a NASA scientist reports in the spring issue of the journal Astrobiology. Recent studies suggest that the mass of bacteria existing below ground may be larger than the mass of all living things at the Earths surface, according to recent studies cited by the paper's lead author, Friedemann Freund, who works at NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Similar hydrogen-consuming microbes may some day be discovered on Mars, raising new prospects for the possible existence of life beyond Earth, Freund added. "The hydrogen that could feed bacteria in the depth of the Earth comes from a subtle chemical reaction that occurs within rocks that were once hot or even molten. In the top 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) of Earth's crust," Freund said, "the conditions are right to produce a nearly inexhaustible supply of hydrogen. In the top 5 to10 kilometers (about 3 to 6 miles) all fissures and cracks in the rocks are probably filled with water. Hydrogen molecules will seep out of the mineral grains, enter the intergranular space and saturate the water. Microorganisms that live in these water films can be expected to use this hydrogen as their vital energy source."
Primitive bacteria exist in huge numbers deep in the Earth, living on hydrogen gas produced in rocks, a NASA scientist reports in the spring issue of the journal Astrobiology. Recent studies suggest that the mass of bacteria existing below ground may be larger than the mass of all living things at the Earths surface, according to recent studies cited by the paper's lead author, Friedemann Freund, who works at NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Similar hydrogen-consuming microbes may some day be discovered on Mars, raising new prospects for the possible existence of life beyond Earth, Freund added.
Most of the worlds recognized planetary scientists accept the model that Mars was once a warm and watery world. Now a radical new Australian theory about the evolution of Mars suggests the planet may have always been a frozen wasteland devoid of life. University of Melbourne geologist Dr. Nick Hoffman has evidence that is forcing these scientists to reassess their long-held beliefs about how Mars formed and whether there is, or ever has been, liquid water and life on the surface of Mars. Dr. Hoffman has studied erosional features scarring the surface of Mars such as valleys, channels and gullies. He suggests that liquid and gaseous carbon dioxide (CO2) could be responsible for gouging out these features, not water, as believed by the majority of scientists.
A pioneering British scientist who was leading studies in Antarctica to understand the likelihood of life existing on Mars and elsewhere has been killed in a car accident. Dr David Wynn-Williams died after he was involved in a crash involving two vehicles near his home in Cambridge. He was the Antarctic astrobiology project leader at the British Antarctic Survey and studied the way microbes survive in harsh conditions as a model for how life might exist on other planets. He was jogging when the crash happened.
As NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft begins exploring the planet, particularly looking for signs of water that once could have nourished life, a University of Dayton geologist is disproving what some pointed to as scientific evidence of past life on the Red Planet. A couple of years ago, the scientific community was rocked by evidence that pointed to possible life on Mars. A 4.5-billion-year-old Martian meteorite showed what seemed to be "a trace of biochemistry, chemical compounds from little critters decaying. Not fossils, but decomposed remnants of life," said Andrea Koziol, associate professor of geology at the University of Dayton. In experiments in her Wohlleben Hall basement laboratory, Koziol has proved the "remnants" could have been created by natural Martian processes -- lessening the credibility of the theory that Mars once hosted life.
A suggestion that dark spots near the south pole of Mars could be a sign of life has led to a meeting of European Space Agency scientists to determine whether the theory warrants a look with ESA's planned Mars Express, scheduled to orbit the planet beginning in late 2003. The spots appear on dunes found on the floors of craters in the south and north polar regions. A Hungarian team has examined the southern spots in detail and reported that the spots appear in late winter and then disappear by summer.
Just days after starting its science mission, a new spacecraft orbiting Mars has struck pay dirt, detecting vast fields of ice that scientists say provide evidence of sufficient water to make it possible for the planet to have harbored life. The discovery is a coup for NASA, whose leaders are using a "follow the water" strategy to understand the evolution of Mars and look for signs of past and present life there. The presence of water would also be key to any future attempt to have astronauts explore the Martian surface. "Water is vital to life. Water has changed the surface of Mars in the past. And water is essential to the future exploration of Mars," R. Stephen Saunders, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's project scientist for the Odyssey orbiter, said at a news conference Friday in Pasadena to release the findings.
If microbial life is found on Mars, will it be native to the planet or something carried there from Earth? Either way, will it be safe to return samples of such organisms to Earth? Astrobiology, the search for life elsewhere, says a University of Illinois microbiologist, is making us look a lot closer at microbial life on Earth -- how it adapts and its relationship to emerging infectious diseases. "Even if we don't find life on other planets, we are learning a lot about life on the Earth, particularly microbial life," Abigail Salyers said in an interview about her speech Friday, Feb. 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, Mass. She challenged scientists to consider far-reaching possibilities in a talk titled "Are There Medical Implications of Geomicrobiology?"
His business card reads: "John D. Rummel, Ph.D., Planetary Protection Officer." He's a cheerful, 49-year-old NASA biologist whose job is to keep the Earth safe from any microbes that might one day turn up on Mars, and to keep our own germs from contaminating the Red Planet -- or any other heavenly body. Even if a spacecraft were to land on a completely sterile planet, there is a danger that microbes on a robot would take hold and forever confound scientific efforts to determine if the germs were native. "We know a lot about life in Florida," Rummel said of NASA's primary launching site. "We don't want to go all the way to Mars, and discover life from Florida."
Armed with the modern tools of biotechnology, scientists are unraveling secrets of the most ancient life forms on Earth -- methane-eating microbes that inhabit deep sediments on the ocean floor, or sulfur-breathing bacteria that lurk in dark fissures miles below ground. To the researchers in the arcane but fascinating field of "geobiology," the distinction between the study of life and the study of Earth is blurred. The minerals beneath us so teem with life that these scientists speak of rocks being "alive."
It's human nature to clean for company more thoroughly than one would for oneself, but nowhere is this truth taken to greater extremes than at the Johnson Space Center. NASA's setting new standards of cleanliness in its labs that handle samples returning from space. And their efforts are laying the groundwork for samples that might some day contain evidence of extraterrestrial life from Mars, Europa, and other points little known. Welcome to the Advanced Curation Laboratory, where the guests could entirely change our view of the Solar System.
A Hungarian research team claims that Martian organisms dot certain areas of the Red Planet. Calling the intriguing blemishes "dark dune spots", the scientists argue that these changing features are "probable Martian surface organisms." Their evidence is based on studies of imagery snapped by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), a spacecraft now orbiting that planet. However, this is at odds with the published conclusions of the MGS team, and at least one leading Mars researcher and astrobiology expert deems the life-form assertion "premature". This is also not the first time that images of Martian surface features from MGS have sparked the life debate.
They eat hydrogen, breathe carbon dioxide, and belch methane. And they form the root of an ecosystem unlike any previously known on Earth. Meet the methanogen, a tiny organism living in complete darkness 660 feet (200 meters) underneath the surface of Idaho. Researchers report in the Jan. 17 issue of the journal Nature the discovery of a community of various organisms dominated and supported by these methanogens, creatures they say could represent just the sort of life to look for when turning over rocks on Mars. The work, along with another report this week of life found in extreme conditions in Antarctica, adds to mounting evidence for life's tenacity and creativity, fueling increased speculation about the prospects for life on other worlds.
The enigmatic Martian asteroid ALH84001, which has been thought by some scientists to contain proof of life on Mars, may prove to be less extraordinary given the results of a recent study involving distant stars. A team of scientists from the University of Amsterdam revealed today in the scientific journal Nature that carbon-based compounds like those inside the Martian asteroid have also been found in two faraway stellar nebulas. Until this discovery, it was thought that all carbonates required liquid-water environments to develop. Now, the carbonates in the meteorite may be inconclusive in proving that liquid water -- and therefore a life-giving environment -- existed on the Red Planet, say the scientists. The carbonates could likely have come from interstellar locales instead.
Deep below the surface of the Beverhead Mountains of Idaho, a research team led by Derek Lovley, head of the microbiology department at the University of Massachusetts, and Francis H. Chappelle of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has found an unusual community of microoganisms that may hold the key to understanding how life could survive on Mars. Their findings are spelled out in the Jan. 17 issue of the journal Nature (vol. 415). "The microbial community we found in Idaho is unlike any previously described on Earth," said Lovley. "This is as close as we have come to finding life on Earth under geological conditions most like those expected below the surface of Mars.
Canadian and New Zealand scientists have found living microbes buried deeper than perhaps ever before in Antarctica's ice-free Dry Valleys. They and collaborating planetary scientists at the University of Arizona say new research "opens up the possibility of life on Mars and the possible positions within a soil where it might be found." An international team is reporting the work in Icarus in an article titled, "Morphogenesis of Antarctic Paleosols: Martian Analogue." According to William C. Mahaney of York a scientist at Ontario University, scientists have discovered long-lived colonies of insecticidal fungi and a common species of Penicillium bacteria at two sites in two salty soil horizons more than one to three inches (3 to 8 centimeters) beneath Antarctic surface pavement.
Calculations by a team of astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin show that jolts of radiation from space may affect biological and atmospheric evolution on planets in our own solar system and those orbiting other stars. The work by David Smith (a former UT-Austin undergraduate, now a graduate student at Harvard University) and UT-Austin astronomers John Scalo and J. Craig Wheeler is presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. Bursts of radiation that can cause biological mutations, or even deliver lethal doses, can come from flares given off by the planet's parent star or from more remote cosmic events (e.g., supernovae and gamma-ray bursts).
For the first time, millions of bacterial spores have been purposely exposed to outer space, to see how they are affected by solar radiation. The results support the idea that life could have arrived on Earth in the form of bacteria carried from Mars on meteorites. The idea that life started elsewhere and spread through space is called panspermia. It was first proposed in 1903 by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who suggested that solar radiation might propel single spores across solar systems. Recent discoveries of Martian meteorites that have reached Earth have raised the possibility that bacterial spores could have hitched a ride on these rocks. Most meteorites spend millions of years in space, but meteorites taking a direct route would make it from Mars to Earth in just a few years - too short a time to experience much damage from deadly cosmic rays.
The theory that meteorites carrying bacteria kickstarted life on Earth has been strengthened by a German experiment that placed bugs in orbit to see if they survived the brutal environment of space. The Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius proposed the theory in 1903, contending that billions of years ago, bacteria drifting through the cosmos landed in the fertile soil of Earth, where they flourished and evolved into higher forms of life. Critics of Arrhenius's so-called pan-spermia theory say that unprotected bacterial hitchhikers would have been slaughtered by cosmic rays and ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. The argument has raged back and forth, spiced by contemporary research into rocks that were knocked off the surface of Mars, presumably by some asteroidal collision, and eventually landed on Earth as meteorites.
Some of the oldest rocks on Earth can be found amid the spiky grass and orange-red dust of Northwestern Australia. While most rocks have been altered over time through geological processes, the Australian rocks have remained relatively unchanged since their inception 3.47 billion years ago. Earlier this year, Yanan Shen of Harvard University, Donald Canfield of Odense University in Denmark, and Roger Buick of the University of Washington announced they found evidence for life in the ancient Australian rocks.
A group of researchers say NASA scientists have failed to prove their contention that a Mars meteorite contains evidence of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet. A group led by Peter Buseck of Arizona State University said the NASA researchers have inadequate evidence showing that tiny crystalline structures in Mars meteorite ALH84001 were formed by bacteria billions of years ago as the rock was sitting on the Martian surface. A study with Buseck as the first author appears today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mars may be alive with active volcanoes, bolstering the prospect that life is firmly rooted on the red planet. New data from instruments aboard the Mars Global Surveyor show evidence for ongoing volcanic activity, with geological features tied to recent floods. Both these volcanic and hydrologic events are young, and could perhaps still occur on Mars in the future. This new evidence was presented late last week during the Geological Society of America's (GSA) annual meeting, held in Boston, Massachusetts.
University of Bradford PhD student Emma Newton is playing a part in helping NASA's planned exploration of Mars in 2005, a trip which many people hope will lead to discovering life on the planet. Emma works in the Department of Chemical and Forensic Sciences studying lichens and cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) for the purpose of understanding the survival strategies adopted by life in the Antarctic. Scientists at NASA hope this type of work will provide a basis for studying any life forms on Mars, as the Antarctic provides one of the nearest Earth analogues to Mars.
Hungarian scientists claimed they have found evidence of living organisms on Mars after sifting through 60,000 photographs taken by NASAs Mars Global Surveyor satellite. Three scientists claim the pictures show evidence of thousands of dark dune spots, similar to organisms found near Earths South Pole, in craters in the snowy southern polar region of Mars. "These spots indicate that on the surface below the ice there are organisms which, absorbing solar energy, are able to melt the ice and create conditions of life for themselves," biologist and team member Tibor Ganti told the Reuters news agency.
The results of NASA's 1976 Viking lander missions were largely inconclusive. But, what if our spacecraft brought tiny forms of Earth life to Mars? Could it have survived there? If so, what does this mean for the future exploration of Mars? How can we seek out life in the solar system without harming it? Can robotic probes built on Earth be made clean enough to search for life on other planets without contaminating it? If we bring samples of alien life back to Earth, how do we prevent them from contaminating Earth's biosphere? "Planetary protection" is the prevention of "cross contamination." That is, preventing life from getting from one planet to another and causing harm. It's an important factor in space exploration that the public is barely aware of, but one that NASA spends a lot of time working on.
Miraculous things happen to the desert when it rains - everything changes from brown to green and organisms that have not been seen for months make a brief emergence from underground lairs. In fact, even the desert's soil turns visibly green following the rare desert rain, as hidden filaments of photosynthesizing cyanobacteria suddenly hydrate. Lying a few millimeters deep, these primitive prokaryotes quickly glide upward, migrating en mass to the surface for an hour or so of light exposure until the dirt begins to dry. Then, just as suddenly, they return again to the subsurface, where they begin the long wait for the next rain.
Speculations about life on Mars have always caused great interest and controversy. Recently, several Internet articles have been posted describing the discovery of Martian Surface Organisms in the south polar region of Mars. As a research scientist working on the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Thermal Emission Spectrometer (TES) Team, I have spent the last four years analyzing data from this Martian region. The data reveal a region active with interesting and intriguing physical phenomena, but does not suggest the existence of life.
Large groups of dark spots in the southern craters of Mars which spread every Martian spring could prove there is life on Mars, Hungarian scientists said Friday. "We cannot find anything else to explain it," said evolutionary biologist Tibor Ganti, a member of the three-man Hungarian team that believes it has discovered life on the red planet. The team studied 60,000 photographs taken by the Mars Global Surveyor Probe before concluding that the organisms lived by photosynthesis.
Hungarian scientists claimed on Friday to have found evidence of living organisms on Mars after analyzing 60,000 photographs taken by the Mars Global Surveyor probe. The three-man team said the pictures showed evidence of thousands of dark dune spots, similar to organisms found near Earth's South Pole, in craters in Mars' snowy southern polar region. "These spots indicate that on the surface below the ice there are such organisms which, absorbing solar energy, are able to melt the ice and create conditions of life for themselves," biologist and team member Tibor Ganti told Reuters.
Hungarian researchers say that during harsh martian winters, when temperatures plummet to minus 200 degrees Celsius (minus 328 Fahrenheit), these so-called Mars Surface Organisms are protected by a thick blanket of ice which then melts as the planet's early summer temperatures climb to just above zero. Large grey dark dune spots -- with a diameter ranging from 10 meters (33 ft) to several hundred meters -- are left behind. The Hungarians claim the spots are dried-out organisms which can reactivate themselves once the colder, icy season sets in again.
NASA recently posted on its Web site detailed data collected at Mars 25 years ago by life-detection experiments aboard the Viking spacecraft. The scientific community's judgment on those findings is one of the longest running and most contentious debates in space science. In 1976, two ingenious spacecraft soft-landed on Mars. Each was equipped with a miniature biology laboratory packed into less space than a domestic microwave oven. The three biology experiments within the package each produced some positive results that might have been associated with living organisms but the overall verdict at the time was that these results were caused by chemical rather than biological processes. All these years later, scientists continue to glean information from the Viking data and still debate whether the results indicate life in the soils of Mars. The pendulum has swung back and forth between chemical and biological explanations for the Viking results.
NASA has posted on the Internet the results of an experiment that tested positive for life on Mars, despite having given little credence to the research for decades. The unexpected action comes in the wake of renewed i nterest in the findings of planetary researcher Gilbert Levin, sparked by a recent re-examination of his data that detected more tantalizing hints of life on Mars.
Spherix (formerly Biospherics Incorporated) (Nasdaq: SPEX), the technology innovations firm that participated in NASA's exploration of Mars for life, today reported that the Agency has sponsored a new website devoted to the Firm's experiment. The purpose of the website is to make the data available to investigators who have become interested in the possibility that the Labeled Release (LR) experiment on the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars detected microbial life in the soil of the Red Planet. The website, prepared by the NASA Planetary Data System's Geosciences Node at Washington University in St. Louis, may be accessed through http://wufs.wustl.edu/missions/vlander/lr.html
The Aerospace Corporation has landed a follow-on effort with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to continue researching the effectiveness of spacecraft cleaning methods used by NASA in missions to planets and moons that could harbor life. "Sterilization of spacecraft is very important for NASA missions to planets and moons that could potentially harbor life," explained Dr. Carl Palko, a project engineer involved in the research. "Outbound sterilization and cleaning is important to prevent both the accidental contamination or infection of alien worlds with terrestrial organisms and the accidental contamination of extraterrestrial soil or ice samples being returned to Earth with terrestrial organisms that could be mistaken as evidence for alien life," Palko said.
When scientists get together to talk about extraterrestrial life, they certainly don't imagine little green men. In fact, our first contact with life beyond our planet probably will involve a microbe. Although it doesn't hold the Hollywood appeal of coming face to face with an alien biped, the search for signs of microbial life in the universe is generating a lot of excitement these days. "Any discovery of extraterrestrial life -- even if it's microbial life -- would be among the most significant scientific discoveries ever," said Chris Chyba, who holds the Carl Sagan chair at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif. Chyba is among the scientists gathered at Crystal Mountain this week for the first astrobiology conference held by the University of Washington.
A team of international researchers said on Tuesday they have found what could be the first proof of life beyond our planet -- clumps of extraterrestrial bacteria in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Although the bugs from space are similar to bacteria on Earth, the scientists said the living cells found in samples of air from the edge of the planet's atmosphere are too far away to have come from Earth. As much as a third of a ton of the biological material is raining down over the entire planet daily, by their estimation.
The claim that alien bacteria had been found high up in the Earth's atmosphere was greeted with a large degree of scepticism on Tuesday. Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, from Cardiff University, UK, told a weekend conference that a balloon flight at an altitude of 41 kilometres had recovered clumps of microbes that most probably had their origin in outer space. But scientists working in the field of astrobiology - the study of life in the Universe - said they had yet to be convinced by the Cardiff evidence.
An expert scientific panel on Sunday said there is convincing evidence that life does exist or did exist at one time-on Mars. For the kickoff session of the International Symposium on Optical Science and Technology, scientists came from the United States, Russia, Portugal, England, France, Austria, Belgium and Puerto Rico to provide what a conference statement called "the strongest evidence to date for primitive life forms on Mars." Their data come from ancient graphite in the Ukraine, Antarctic depths, extraterrestrial meteorites found on Earth, dust in the upper atmosphere, the Hubble Space Telescope and especially from Mars itself.
A claim that NASA overlooked evidence of life on Mars in data collected by the Viking missions 25 years ago has been met with interest and scepticism. Joseph Miller, a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, re-analysed data collected by probes sent to the Martian surface by the Viking 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1976. He believes tests performed on soil samples reveal a cycle of chemical activity similar to the daily rhythms seen in living organisms on Earth.
Previously dismissed claims for evidence of life in Martian soil samples collected more than 20 years ago now appear to have been right on the money. So says a University of Southern California biologist who recently reanalyzed the data and presented his findings last Friday at an astrobiology symposium held during the annual meeting of the International Society for Optical Engineering. Back in the 1970s, the NASA researchers who first studied the soil, which had been gathered by the Viking Landers 1 and 2, found clear indications of gas release that they believed came from living organisms. Others countered, however, that such gases more likely resulted from chemical reactions among highly reactive inorganic compounds in the soil, and the argument for life on the Red Planet fell by the wayside.
There is new life in old dataand it's likely Martian life. Several scientists have found compelling evidence that Viking Mars landers did indeed discover life on the red planet in 1976. A re-examination of findings relayed to Earth by the probes some 25 years ago, claim the experts, show the tell-tale signs of microbes lurking within the Martian soil. The researchers will unveil their views Sunday, July 29, at a session on astrobiology, held during the SPIE's 46th annual International Society for Optical Engineering meeting in San Diego, California.
Data collected 25 years ago on the surface of Mars by NASA's twin Viking landers show evidence of life, a scientist claimed Friday. Other scientists quickly cast doubt on the claim by Joseph Miller. They cited a variety of other explanations for the data radioed back to Earth as the landers performed experiments in an effort to find any trace of life on the Red Planet. Miller, an associate professor in the Department of Cell and Neurobiology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said he detected distinct rhythms in the levels of gas given off during the range of experiments that sought to prompt the growth of microbial life in samples of Martian soil doused with water and nutrients.
Did NASA discover evidence of life on Mars and then misplace it for almost 25 years? A University of Southern California scientist argues that is just what happened and that once-lost data collected by the 1975 Viking probes suggest the existence of Martian microbes. The significance of that finding was overlooked -- along with the data itself -- after NASA concluded that its experiments showed only signs of chemical activity on the surface of the "Red Planet," said Joseph Miller, a USC neurobiologist. But a careful reexamination of a fragment of the recovered NASA record showed a surprising pattern: gas released by the Martian soil and tracked by Viking followed the same kind of rhythms followed by all Earth-bound organisms from humans to fruit flies in a cycle akin to feeding and respiration by colonies of microbes.
As NASA struggles to refocus its Mars program on the heels of two failed missions, one supremely logical mantra has emerged to guide the search for Martian life: Follow the water. Great advice. But hard to heed on such a dry and dusty planet. No matter how much water might once have flowed on Mars, the place now looks downright dead. Liquid water, if it exists, might be a mile deep or more, scientists say. But there are two places where water is known to exist in mass quantities, right at the surface: The polar caps.
As advanced microscopes enable us to peer deeper into the realms of inner space, biologists have been faced with a vexing question: Is there a size limit on life? If so, then just how small can something be before it can no longer be defined as "life"? Some scientists believe that life can be very small indeed. Called nanobes, nanobacteria, or nano-organisms, these miniscule structures borrow their name from their unit of measurement, the nanometer. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. That's about the length of 10 hydrogen atoms laid out side by side. The period at the end of this sentence is approximately one million nanometers in diameter.
The mightiest probe ever to land on another planet settled down on Mars on this day 25 years ago, igniting a scientific firestorm that still rages today -- Does the red planet possess life?
In a quest to detect Martian life 25 years ago, the U.S. Viking 1 Lander plopped down, peeked about and poked the ground. Along with its later arriving twin, the robotic Vikings gulped down scoops of dirt, digesting the material in a kind of exotic microbial game of feast or famine.
Seven years after members of Congress rejected research into extraterrestrial life as a search for "little green men," lawmakers encouraged scientists in their efforts to find life beyond the Earth. "The discovery of life in the universe would be one of the most astounding discoveries in human history," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said Thursday at a hearing of the House space science subcommittee. "Funding should match public interest and I don't believe it does."
As an alien sun blazes through its death throes, it is apparently vaporizing a surrounding swarm of comets, releasing a huge cloud of water vapor, a team of astronomers reported today. The discovery, reported in an article to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature, is the result of observations with the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS), a small radio observatory that NASA launched into space in December 1998. "Over the past two years, SWAS has detected water vapor from a wide variety of astronomical sources," says Dr. Gary Melnick of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Principal Investigator on the SWAS mission. "What makes the results we are reporting today so unusual is that we have found a cloud of water vapor around a star where we would not ordinarily have expected to find water."
Mars has turned into a red planet Rorschach test. Depending on who is doing the looking, pictures snapped by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) clearly show a world of big time biota, from fields of vegetation and towering Banyan trees, to blotches of bacteria. As MGS plods along on its scientific tour-of-duty, Mars does not shirk from its claim of being one weird world. It doesn't matter whether Mars snapshots are examined by do-it-yourself interpreters or scrutinized by veteran planetary geologists. There is no doubt that there are strange doings on the red planet.
Many Mars rocks possess a chemical quality that suggests they harbor life, which could eke out an existence in a similar manner as microbes in the harshest, driest places on Earth, according to a new report. Studying images taken by two Mars landers, a planetary researcher found striking similarities between rocks on the red planet and rocks in terrestrial deserts known to contain thin layers of primitive life.
We earthlings have long fantasized, feared and hoped that we're not alone in the universe. Yet somehow, our dreams of alien life only seem to feature the UFO-flying variety of creature. In "Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology," astronomer David Darling contends that "life" encompasses more than E.T. and the green-skinned go-go girls of "Star Trek." Bacterial life-forms from other planets have the potential to profoundly affect our understanding of the cosmos, as well as ourselves. Darling expertly explores the accomplishments and goals of this young, controversial science and looks with great optimism to the possibility of discovering life on Mars, on the moons of Jupiter and even on planets outside our solar system.
Look for life in pools of water in the polar regions of Mars, say scientists. Liquid water is the key for life, they say, but over most of Mars the atmospheric pressure is too low for water to exist in that state. Now, an assessment of all the available satellite data suggests that there may be pools of open water at the poles, or small lakes just under the ice. A research project is already underway that will gather as much information as possible on Mars' polar regions, and look for lakes so that future landers can be targeted on them.
Noted writer Arthur C. Clarke, in a speech at the Werner von Braun Memorial Lecture series held in Washington, D.C. on June 6, has stated that he believes that new images of Mars clearly show the red planet dotted with patches of vegetation, including trees. He spoke over the telephone from his home in Sri Lanka to an audience at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
As winter gives way to spring in the martian southern hemisphere, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) is observing the retreat of the south polar frost cap as sunlight falls upon it for the first time in several months. One of the most aesthetically-pleasing aspects of the spring defrosting process is the pattern that is created on the martian sand dune fields.
A possible mechanism for transfer of life between planets is via rocks ejected by major asteroid or comet impacts. The term "transpermia" was coined by Oliver Morton to describe the transfer of lifeforms by this method and to distinguish it from the more general concept of panspermia.
A new era in space exploration is slowly opening up as we prepare for the return of samples beyond the Moon: from comets, Mars and Europa. But there is a downside to this glorious new age of exploration - two downsides, actually. Firstly there is a good deal of apprehension among the general public that samples returned from other worlds such as Mars - just might - contain alien germs capable of turning into a worldwide plague, or at least wreaking havoc with the Earth's natural environment. Beside this fear of "back contamination", there is also a fear of "forward contamination" - the possibility that spacecraft might contaminate the worlds they land on with Earth microbes, destroying scientifically priceless alien lifeforms before we even have a chance to study them.
The University of Washington's Center for Astrobiology and Early Evolution is hosting an exciting conference at the dawn of the new field of Astrobiology. The purpose of this conference is to bring together experts to discuss Astrobiology's fundamental principles, past accomplishments, latest scientific results, and future research and technological directions. Rather than the usual proceedings, the conference will produce a graduate student level textbook invaluable to the overall development of the field: Astrobiology: The University of Washington Lectures. The book will be a high-level, interdisciplinary introduction to the origin and evolution of life on Earth, the geological, physical and chemical conditions that have spawned and sustained life, and the detection of extant and extinct life on other planets and moons.
An international row is brewing over claims that a strain of bacteria was brought back to life after having remained dormant in a rock crystal for 250 million years.
If you read science fiction, especially the vintage science fiction of the '50s and '60s, or modern pseudo-science, you will find Mars is often home to extraterrestrial life. And not infrequently, these Martians are hostile to Earthlings. June 13, Mars reaches opposition, the point in its orbit where it's closest to Earth and brightest in our sky. With Mars so prominent in the night sky, the question of life on the Red Planet seems a natural topic of inquiry.
There was never a "Eureka!" moment for David McKay. Instead, a slow, gradual process that led to the announcement that fossilized minerals produced by bacteria may lie deep inside a 4-billion-year-old potato-sized Martian meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984. It was one of the first pieces of credible evidence that remnants of life, however tiny, may have come from Mars to Earth. That was five years ago. Afterward, scientists still debated whether the fossils truly were of non-Earth origin.
Finally, the debate continued to rage on at the Conference as to whether the famous Martian meteorite ALH84001 does or does not contain meaningful fossil evidence of ancient Martian microbes.
The European Space Agency is planning a major search for extraterrestrial life. The initial research targets will be Mars, the Moon, Jupiter's moon Europa and a number of asteroids.
Is our planet an oasis of life in an otherwise dead universe? Twenty years ago, the scientific consensus was "yes, probably". Now it has shifted to "probably not" and the field of astro- (or exo-) biology is burgeoning. This growth of interest is evident this week at ESRIN, ESA's European Space Research Institute in Frascati, Italy, which is hosting the first European workshop on exo/astrobiology. About 200 scientists from fields as diverse as astrophysics, geology, environmental sciences, biology and chemistry are attending. Yesterday, they took the opportunity to set up the European Exo/astrobiology Network to coordinate their growing efforts.
University of Arkansas researchers have moved one step closer to growing microorganisms under Mars-like conditions by suspending them in water containing dissolved matter from Mars soil simulant. D. Ryan Ormond, Curtis R. Bekkum and Timothy Kral, associate professor of biological sciences, report their findings at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, May 23, at the American Society for Microbiology meeting in Orlando.
Is our planet an oasis of life in an otherwise dead universe? Twenty years ago, the scientific consensus was "yes, probably". Now it has shifted to "probably not" and the field of astro- (or exo-) biology is burgeoning. This growth of interest is evident this week at ESRIN, ESA's European Space Research Institute in Frascati, Italy, which is hosting the first European workshop on exo/astrobiology. About 200 scientists from fields as diverse as astrophysics, geology, environmental sciences, biology and chemistry are attending. Yesterday, they took the opportunity to set up the European Exo/astrobiology Network to coordinate their growing efforts.
This workshop is the first attempt to bring together those working on astrobiology in the Australia/New Zealand region. We expect the workshop to attract a cross disciplinary group of scientists interested in the origin, distribution and future of life in the universe. The workshop is being held at Macquarie University which is located in North Ryde about 18km north-west of the centre of Sydney. The event will begin on the evening of July 11th with a public lecture and reception The scientific program will cover two full days (Jul 12,13).
An Italian team reportedly has found and revived bacteria harbored in an ancient meteorite, a finding that points to the existence of extraterrestrial life but has yet to pass scientific muster. Bruno D'Argenio of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) in Naples and Giuseppe Geraci of the University of Naples discovered the bacteria, called "cryms" or cristallomicrobi, within the crystalline structure of space rocks found in several parts of the world, the Italian newspaper La Stampa reported.
Cloning, move over. The powerful and potentially dark force that would give you a "mini-me" may soon be knocked off genetic engineering's center stage by an emerging laboratory effort to create life that is decidedly not as we know it. In two separate research efforts, scientists have altered the very nature of nature by creating cells that break a cardinal rule of biology, incorporating an entirely new basic building block into their cellular structures. It is a first step on a path of neogenesis -- the creation of alternate life forms.
Perhaps in 2008, a rover on Mars will press its robotic arm against a rock. A probe at the end of the arm will scan the rock, repeatedly zapping the surface with a microscopically thin laser beam, probably green or ultraviolet. As the laser light hits the rock, it will scatter (be deflected) in random directions. Most of that light will stay the same color, but a tiny fraction will be shifted just slightly to a different color, a phenomenon called the Raman effect. That slight shift will reveal whether the rock harbors the chemical signatures of life, either microbes now alive or the remains of organisms that lived in the past. The "Raman-shifted" light also can detect any minerals indicating whether Mars once was conducive to life.
Biologists always thought life required the Sun's energy, until they found an ecosystem that thrives in complete darkness.
Rock-riding microbes tossed out of our solar system may have become star-trekking voyagers, by crossing deep space and planting themselves on planets circling other suns. This solar system-to-solar system seeding of life is called interstellar panspermia. It is now commonly thought that meteorite-sized rock fragments can be ejected from one planet to land on another. Meteorite collections include rocks believed heaved our way from the planet Mars and the Moon. These celestial hunks of material reached Earth after those worlds were subjected to large impacts of asteroids or comets eons ago. But Earth isn't only on the receiving end of chunky-style helpings of its planetary neighbors -- it works both ways.
When Mir splashed down almost two weeks ago, many scientists were concerned that fungal spores that had developed on the inside of the space station would contaminate Earth's environment with some kind of primordial space goop, introducing an unknown life form. But what about contamination going the other direction? With the launch of Mars Odyssey on Saturday and a full slate of missions ready to launch for Mars this decade, what is being done to ensure that we don't contaminate Mars with our own goop?
Ebola outbreaks. Mad cow disease. Now the huge effort to contain the highly contagious foot-and-mouth plague sweeping across England, infecting cattle, sheep and other cloven-hoofed animals. These are a few of the biological battlegrounds here on Earth. But they also offer insight into future projects designed to bring to Earth samples from Mars, asteroids and comets. NASA has had a long-standing effort underway in planetary protection.
It is fitting that the Antarctic-recovered Martian meteorite, ALH84001, is potato-shaped. After years of argument, the "Mars rock" continues to be just that -- a scientific hot potato. The inside story is that the meteorite may contain evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet. Trying to anchor that belief in a sea of skepticism remains a daunting and challenging, but dutiful task for those making the assertion.
The list of candidates in our solar system most likely to harbor life or show signs of past life has narrowed in recent months. A hot debate now rages, inside NASA and throughout the science world, over where and how best to conduct the hunt. Uniquely human, we cannot agree on how to answer the biggest questions in life.
In 1998, NASAs Associate Administrator Wesley Huntress, Jr., stated, "Wherever liquid water and chemical energy are found, there is life. There is no exception." Could there, then, be life on Mars? In the mid-1970s, the Viking Lander missions Gas Exchange Experiment detected strong chemical activity in the martian soil. Liquid water seems to be the one element needed for the equation of life on Mars. The presence of water there, however, is still hotly contested.
Is there life on other planets? If so, does it look like the monstrous thing Sigourney Weaver battled in the "Alien" movie blockbusters? Could you kiss it the way Captain Kirk was so fond of doing on "Star Trek"? Or, could it be related to your house plant? Students are grappling with such lively questions in "Astrobiology: The Search for Life in the Universe," a course being piloted at Leicester, West Springfield, and 23 other high schools and middle schools nationwide.
Scientists have become increasingly convinced in recent years that Mars, which now appears mostly dry on the surface, was once warm and wet -- the sort of place where life might have got a toehold and possibly even flourished. But looming questions have formed around this expectation: Where did the water come from, and for how long was the Red Planet wet? A new study points a finger at one of the most obvious features on Mars, a hulking, elevated region known as the Tharsis rise that may have released tremendous amounts of lava, along with water and carbon dioxide that combined to possibly create a habitable planet. The research also narrows the range of time, under this scenario, that Mars would have been wet.
Volcanoes on the red planet could have melted ice and produced water necessary for life. They also could still be active, planetary scientists said this week. The volcanoes heated up ground ice on Mars and caused the melted water to flow downhill, which carved channels that today appear in satellite images as dry riverbeds radiating away from the volcanic centers, the researchers theorized.
Two of the oldest volcanoes on Mars, which have been active for 3.5 billion years, are providing clues to the possibility of life on the planet, according to preliminary analysis by University at Buffalo geologists of new data from the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA), currently orbiting the planet.
The new evidence that magnetite crystals in the martian meteorite ALH84001 are of biological origin raises the possibility that life may have once existed on Mars. Papers presenting these results were published Feb. 27 in a special Astrobiology issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Finding evidence of life on Mars is one of the central focuses of NASAs astrobiology research. But what does it mean? Ask a Mars Expert Book a window with Dr. Chris McKay, an Astrobiology researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, on Thursday, March 1, between 5:00 9:00 p.m. EST (2:00 6:00 p.m. PST)
After being batted around the solar system like some cosmic softball, a rock from Mars ended up on Earth thousands of years ago. Now, 17 years after its discovery, it has become science's most studied stone. Researchers say the rock, known as the Allen Hills meteorite, provides compelling evidence that there was life on Mars, at least in the distant past. Few questions loom larger in space science today. If Mars once had life, than we humans would be faced with the increased likelihood that life has sprung up elsewhere, and we that are not alone. But after five years of intense scrutiny, the scientific community is no closer to agreement on whether the rock tells us anything.
An international team of researchers has discovered compelling evidence that the magnetite crystals in the martian meteorite ALH84001 are of biological origin. The researchers found that the magnetite crystals embedded in the meteorite are arranged in long chains, which they say could have been formed only by once-living organisms. Their results are reported in the Feb. 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A crystal found in a meteorite from Mars could only have been formed by a microbe and may be evidence of the oldest life form ever found, researchers say. Scientists at the Johnson Space Center in Houston say that a crystalized magnetic mineral, called magnetite, found in a Martian meteorite is similar to crystals formed on Earth by bacteria. "I am convinced that this is supporting evidence for the presence of ancient life on Mars," said Kathie Thomas-Keprta, an astrobiologist at the space center and the first author of a study appearing Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Thomas-Keprta said there is no report of such magnetites being formed by any but biologic means.
Scientists have published what they claim is "conclusive evidence" that bacteria once lived on Mars. The study is a follow-up to the famous 1996 research that purported to show ancient bacterial forms in a meteorite from Mars. Critics at the time said the evidence was too thin to prove anything. Now, a Nasa-backed team from the US, Spain and Germany has published further work which it says strengthens the earlier claims. But some British experts, at least, are still sceptical, arguing the latest study falls short of absolute proof. The argument centres on tiny crystals found in a potato-sized meteorite picked up in Antarctica in 1984. The international team says the crystals are the same as those deposited by earthly microorganisms known as magnetotactic bacteria. Since the meteorite is from Mars, it can only be assumed that the same bacteria must have lived on Mars as well, the team says.
It isn't a new field: Carl Sagan was arguing for the plausibility of other worlds -- and other life -- way back in 1966. But astrobiology, in recent years, has seen a rebirth. The rapid-fire discovery of a few dozen extrasolar planets will do that. Ditto the finding of what could be fossil bacteria in a hunk of Martian meteorite. Then there are the fresh insights about life here at home. Who knew, 15 years ago, that there was more of it embedded in rocks beneath Earth's surface than there is above ground? Or that living things thrive in boiling hotsprings and Antarctic wastes?
Buried under thousands of feet of ice in the Antarctic are a series of fresh water lakes unexposed to the open air for millions of years but possibly holding a thriving community of microbes, scientists say. Researchers probing beneath the permanent ice shield around the South Pole have located at least 76 lakes, including one that is about 5,400 square miles, comparable to Lake Ontario. Lake Vostok, the largest of the polar lakes, lies beneath more than two miles of ice and is thought to have a liquid pool with a depth of about 3,000 feet, said John C. Priscu of Montana State University. Probing Lake Vostok may help in the future search for life in outer space. Priscu said the lake may resemble subsurface lakes thought to exist on Mars and on Europa, a moon of Jupiter.
The Viking space missions to Mars in the 1970s sent back a mixed message about the red planet. The views were fabulous; but the nightlife was a little quiet. The two Viking lander craft touched down on the martian surface in 1976, scooped up handfuls of dust, and pronounced it devoid of the organic material that might signify the presence of microorganisms. But even if there had been several million bacteria-like cells in every gram of Martian soil, the Viking landers would not have detected them, Jeffrey Bada and his co-workers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, now claim.
Biology professor Tim Kral won't argue with anyone if they call his fascination with Mars an obsession. He loves the Red Planet, with its average temperature of -60 degrees C and atmosphere that's 95 percent carbon dioxide. In Professor Kral's office at the University of Arkansas, Martian figurines sit on shelves next to books about scientific topics that most people wouldn't even know how to pronounce. "I have always been interested in the search for life out there," Kral says. And that search is what keeps him occupied at the Arkansas-Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Science, which opened last month in Fayetteville. The center's main tool for planetary study will be the Andromeda chamber, which, when it's fully assembled in the coming months, will allow researchers and students to simulate the conditions of planets, comets, and asteroids.
The case for ancient life on Mars looks better than ever after scientists announced last week that they had discovered magnetic crystals inside a Martian meteorite -- crystals that, here on Earth, are produced only by microscopic life forms. Scientists studying the Allan Hills meteorite, a 4-billion-year-old rock from Mars that landed in Antarctica about 13,000 years ago, found just such crystals deep inside the space rock.
An Iowa State University professor is part of a research team that has found compelling evidence that Mars once supported primitive life. The researchers discovered evidence of bacteria in a Martian meteorite. Tiny magnetite crystals -- so called magnetofossils -- embedded in the meteorite were confirmed to be the type produced only by a biological process unique to magnetotactic bacteria.
Mounting evidence from seafloor critters to ancient soil and even Moon rocks suggests that life on early Earth survived heavy bombardment from space rocks, pointing to an earlier origin for terrestrial life and opening wider the window of possibilities for where life might exist in the cosmos.
The layers upon layers of rock formations seen in newly unveiled images of Mars may contain beds of fossilized Martian life ripe for the picking by future missions to the Red Planet, scientists said. The beds of rock may have formed as sediments settled to the bottom of primordial seas or lakes bodies of water that once may have teemed with Martian life in the planets ancient past. As such, the bands of rock may contain evidence that life is not unique to Earth.
NASA scientists have discovered ancient sea or lake beds on the surface of Mars that could once have harboured life, writes Jonathan Leake. The discovery is among the most significant concerning Mars so far, because such places are the most likely locations for fossils or other signs of past life.
According to a NASA press release, "Imaging scientists Dr. Michael Malin and Dr. Ken Edgett from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft will present what they describe as their most significant discovery yet at a Space Science Update at 2:00 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 7. Their findings are being published in the December 8 issue of Science Magazine.
Scientists with NASA's Astrobiology Institute (NAI) have discovered fossilized remnants of microbial mats that developed on land between 2.6 billion and 2.7 billion years ago in the Eastern Transvaal district of South Africa. This significant discovery presents the strongest evidence to date that life on land occurred at a much earlier stage in Earth's history than was previously believed by most scientists. It also suggests that an ozone shield and an oxygen-rich atmosphere existed on Earth 2.6 billion years ago, both necessary conditions for life on land to emerge. The results are reported in the Nov. 30 issue of Nature magazine.
A group of scientists says it has collected an alien bacterium 10 miles above Earth, plus signatures of other extraterrestrial microbes even higher in the atmosphere. The claims were met with immediate skepticism by other scientists. The bacterium was collected 10 miles (16 kilometers) high by balloon operated by the Indian Space Research Organization. Chandra Wickramasinghe, who leads a study into the results, called the microbe a previously unknown strain of bacteria and said it likely came from a comet.
Gerald Soffen, project scientist on NASA's Viking missions to Mars, died Wednesday of a heart ailment. He was 74. Soffen most recently was director of university programs at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where he led the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's study of life in the universe through its astrobiology program.
An international team of scientists has recovered microorganisms in the upper reaches of the atmosphere that could have originated from outer space, a participant in the study said Friday. The living bacteria, plucked from an altitude of 10 miles (16 km) or higher by a scientific balloon, could have been deposited in terrestrial airspace by a passing comet, according to the researchers. The microorganisms are unlike any known on Earth, but the astrobiologists "want to keep the details under wraps until they are absolutely convinced that these are extraterrestrial," said study participant Chandra Wickramasinghe, a noted scientist at Cardiff University in Wales.
Scientists in Wales said they discovered what may be a tiny form of primitive alien life that a passing comet may have dropped into Earth's atmosphere, London's Daily Mail newspaper reported today. Researchers said that in the filter of a high-flying balloon operated by the Indian Space Research Organization, they found a strain of bacteria unlike anything on Earth. The bacteria were found at an altitude of 10 miles and scientists from the ISRO, Cardiff University and the University of Wales College of Medicine said it may have come from a comet on a close approach to earth, according to the Daily Mail. Prof. Chandra Wickramasinghe, who is based at Cardiff University, said the discovery marked "the first time we have had direct evidence for the hypothesis that comets seed life on other planets."
Data from instruments flown on airplanes during last year's Leonid meteor shower show that the seeds of life, long suspected to exist in comet dust, could have survived a fiery passage from space to Earth's ancient atmosphere. A range of findings, reported by an international team of NASA-led scientists, provide support for panspermia, which holds that life on Earth did not spring up spontaneously out of some primordial soup, but was instead seeded from space.
Life exists even at the South Pole, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, with microbiologist Ed Carpenter of the State University of New York in Stony Brook and his colleagues finding between 200 and 5000 bacteria per millilitre of melted snow from the pole. To their surprise, biochemical tests and electron microscope images show that the organisms can grow and divide even at -17 degrees C -- the coldest condition the team tested. "Probably they could live at even lower temperatures," says Carpenter.
In the wake of last month's announcement that scientists have found what they believe to be a living microbe that pre-dates Tyrannosaurus rex, Dr. Melanie Mormile is keeping one eye on salt crystals that contain ancient earth-bound bacteria and another on Mars. Mormile, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri-Rolla and an expert on microscopic organisms, thinks living bacteria might be trapped in the sulphate and chloride salts of Mars. Her work is partially funded by NASA, which announced Oct. 26 that it has officially scheduled six robotic missions over the next ten years to hunt for signs of life on the red planet.
The idea that the seeds of life are ubiquitous throughout the cosmos goes back to Anaxagoras, a Greek philosopher. In the 1800s, French chemist Louis Pasteur proposed that spontaneous generation of life could not have occurred on Earth. British physicist Lord Kelvin and others jumped on Pasteur's bandwagon and suggested that life might have come from space. But modern-day panspermia advocates have been the Rodney Dangerfields of science. In fact, just two leading researchers carry the bulk of the panspermia torch. The renowned Sir Fred Hoyle, known for his studies of star structure and the origin of the chemical elements in stars, has worked with Chandra Wickramasinghe over the past three decades to pioneer the modern theory of panspermia.
When Joseph L. Kirschvink heard about the capabilities of the new magnetic microscope designed and built by scientists at Vanderbilts Living State Physics Laboratory, he immediately had an idea for an important experiment that the instrument was uniquely suited to perform. The professor of geobiology at the California Institute of Technology had samples of the famous Martian meteorite, ALH84001, and he realized that he could use the Vanderbilt instrument to gain important new information about the meteorites thermal history, information that could provide valuable support for the popular theory that, over geologic time, Martian meteorites may have carried microbial life from Mars to Earth.
In a discovery that has scientists rethinking where they came from, a groundbreaking study has revealed that living organisms could emigrate through the solar system in the relatively cool womb of a space rock, spreading life with little more fanfare than the arrival of a shooting star. The finding, hidden from scientists for more than 15 years in the magnetic structure of a well-studied meteorite found in Antarctica, presents a serious alternative to the idea that life on Earth arose spontaneously out of some primordial soup. The bottom line: Our ancestors may have been Martians.
If we discover living or dormant organisms on Mars and these forms represent a different type of life than the life we have on Earth, then we should not bring life from Earth to Mars. Instead we should alter the martian environment so that this native martian life can expand to fill a planetary scale biosphere. There is general agreement within the Mars research community that if Mars is indeed a lifeless planet then there is potential scientific, cultural, and human value in bringing life from Earth to Mars. The re-creation of habitable conditions on Mars is within our technological reach. To a Mars long since dead, Earth could give the gift of its genome: a biological heritage encapsulating billions of years of evolution. For Mars this would represent a jump start back into a biological future.
A Lazarus bacterium which thrived millions of years before dinosaurs walked the Earth has been brought back to life. Biologists are astonished that the 250-million-year-old bug could be revived. It suggests that if conditions are right, bacterial spores might survive indefinitely. John Parkes, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Bristol, comments: "All the laws of chemistry tell you that the complex molecules in the spores should have degraded to very simple compounds such as carbon dioxide." He wonders that if it is proven that spores can survive this long, why should they die at all? "Where else are these dormant organisms waiting to be reawakened?"
A unique form of underwater structure found in a lake in B.C.'s southern Interior could help determine whether life ever existed on Mars or elsewhere in the universe. For more than 20 years, recreational scuba divers have known about a formation of coral-like structures in Pavilion Lake, between Lillooet and Cache Creek. But the large underwater deposits never attracted any scientific interest.
A team of interdisciplinary astrobiologists from NASA and other agencies is homing in on recognizing the microbial biosignatures for life, making it easier someday to identify life on other planets. A scientific paper analyzing the team's research results, titled "Modern Freshwater Microbialite Analogues for Ancient Dendritic Reef Structures," will be published in the magazine Nature on Oct. 5. The paper focuses on the study of mounded microbialite deposits - layers of living and non-living organisms - found at Pavilion Lake in Canada. Microbialites are organic sedimentary mineral deposits covered by a thin layer of microbes that become entombed in the mounds as they grow outward.
Scientists have sequenced the genome of the first salt-loving extremophile, a micro-organism that can survive in conditions 10 times saltier than seawater. The genetic data will shed light on how these primitive organisms are able to thrive in extreme environments like salt mines or salty lakes. Ultimately, researchers hope to harness the bug's genetic secrets for use in biotechnology, for example to develop rice that grows in salty soil. The information might also be used to investigate whether inhospitable planets like Mars once harboured similar lifeforms, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of how life arose on Earth.
Experiments in Mars-like areas in Antarctica could provide clues about how best to search for signs of life on the inhospitable red planet, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday. Scientists from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) found that mysteriously high salt concentrations in the exposed soils of Antarctica's Dry Valleys -- areas perennially devoid of snow and ice cover -- were due to sulfur-emitting marine algae. In a discovery important for Martian exploration, the scientists also found that digging more deeply into the soil of the Dry Valleys yielded higher concentrations of biologically produced sulfates.
Suggestions that life, or the potential for it, existed on Mars have been dealt a blow by a new question mark that has been placed over one of the main pieces of evidence -- Martian meteorites found in Antarctica. Of the 15 Martian meteorites so far retrieved on Earth, six have been found in the dry valleys of Antarctica.
Dr. Serguei M. Pershin PhD, a Principal Investigator for the NASA Mars Polar Lander LIDAR experiment, Russia's first experiment on a US spacecraft claims he has discovered organic pigments on Mars relating to ancient photosynthetic organisms. ICAMSR Executive Director, Barry E. DiGregorio has written an exclusive article about his discovery in the September issue of Spectroscopy magazine.
What is destroying organic molecules on the surface of Mars? This is the question discussed by a group of scientists led by Albert Yen of JPL and Bruce Murray of Caltech, president of the Planetary Society. Needless to say, the answer to this question is crucial for the search for life on the Red Planet.
The trouble with science is that nature is honest. It doesn't always give you the answers you want. The US space administration NASA has confessed that its priority for future planetary missions to Mars is to look for life. Yet every attempt to find evidence for Martians so far has failed, and it is starting to look as though there might not be any needles in the haystack anyway. Even the report in 1996 of possible 'fossils' of Martian bacteria in a meteorite thrown to Earth from the Red Planet now has a tattered reputation. But still Mars teases, exposing glimpses of a wetter past and even perhaps a sporadically watery present.
Scientists have recreated Martian conditions in test tubes, producing a "disinfectant" that may help explain the planet's rusty red color and why life and organic material have not been found on the surface. The chemical is superoxide; a "free radical" or oxidant like those implicated in human cell damage from cigarette smoking, radiation and diseases like heart disease and cancer. "You would not expect life to exist at the immediate surface of Mars because production of these oxygen radicals will destroy organic molecules," said planetary geochemist Albert Yen of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "If life exists on Mars, it needs to be in a place where these chemicals dont exist."
Find liquid water on Mars, and life may not be far behind. Many scientists believe that this water can only exist thousands of metres beneath the planet's surface. So a team of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is developing a robotic mole that can drill deep into Mars and return samples to the surface through a tube that it constructs as it digs.
A new study shows that life can not only survive beneath tons of ice at the dark, near-freezing junctions between glaciers and Earth, but actually thrive there. Researchers say the discovery reinforces the notion that the bottom of the ice cap at Mars' north pole should be a primary target in the search for life.
Mars needs a planetary make over. A little ozone here, a touch of genetic engineering there, stir in some oxygen - you've got the makings of a planet you can write home about. The terraforming of Mars - making the planet hospitable to human life by manipulating its atmosphere and surface - could give humanity a new, comfortable home beyond the Earth.
Mars, 2012: A lean landing craft touches down on Mars, at a site judged to have the best chances for finding some trace of water. Guided by scientists on Earth, the robot works its way into a crevasse that looks like it might once have hosted an active hot spring. The landing craft begins to sample dirt and scratch rocks to collect anything that might hold signs of life. It dumps that material into a chamber and then begins to search the material for molecular DNA the most basic building block common to all known life.
The complex chemical structures found in a meteorite from Mars, which scientists in 1996 hailed as possible evidence of past life on the planet, can be reproduced quite simply in any laboratory according to new research from the University of Greenwich. Professor Aron Vecht and researcher Terry Ireland from the university's School of Chemical & Life Sciences say that the special structures -- which are shaped like flowers and spheres -- could have been formed on the cold surface of Mars from minerals commonly occurring there. Their findings cast grave doubts on the possibility of Martian life.
As NASA races to revamp its failed Mars exploration program, scientists are torn over how aggressively the agency should proceed with a risky and expensive robotic mission that could hasten the search for life on the Red Planet. On Thursday, more than 200 experts wrapped up three days of NASA-sponsored debate at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston over how the agency should reshape its Mars exploration strategy in response to a pair of mission failures last year.
Norman Pace strides across his office and returns with a small rock plucked from the frigid wastes of Antarctica. The University of Colorado biologist, who is credited with finding organic life in some of the harshest places on Earth, turns the stone in his hand and says, "A fundamental question is whether there is photosynthesis going on, on the surface of Mars," itself a frosty wasteland. "If there is life on Mars, this is what you're going to see," says Dr. Pace, pointing to a colored layer in the rock, once home to millions of microorganisms.
In light of recent evidence pointing to the existence of water on Mars, the next step in the minds of many scientists is to search for life on the Red Planet, and a UC Berkeley faculty member thinks he knows exactly how to do this. UC Berkeley professor emeritus David Gan is scheduled tomorrow morning to tell NASA scientists and aeronautics experts from around the world about a machine he has designed to test for life on Mars.
Not since the twin Viking Landers set down on the surface of Mars over 24 years ago, has NASA included a biologist, paleontologist, or ichnologist (study of trace fossils) on any of its missions. Viking was unique as the first spacecraft to land and search for life on another planet. As such, the Viking program enlisted the talents of three Principal Biology Investigators, a Biology Team Leader and co-experimenters.
In 1976 the twin Viking Lander spacecraft touched down on the surface of Mars and began the first ever, search for extraterrestrial life. Onboard where three miniaturized biology laboratories each with a unique focus on how to look for microbial life on Mars. Of the three biology instruments on each Viking Lander, the Labeled Release experiment designed by Dr. Gilbert V. Levin, obtained intriguing results that Levin says is consistent with microbial metabolism.
Life may have begun not in the sea but in tiny water droplets drifting high in the sky. Thrown up by ocean waves, these droplets could have provided just the conditions needed for complex molecules to form.
In a finding that may extend the known limits of life on Earth, researchers supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have discovered evidence that microbes may be able to survive the heavy doses of ultraviolet radiation and the extreme cold and darkness of the South Pole.
In a finding that could have an impact on the search for life on Mars and other planets, scientists say they have detected hardy microbes that seem to thrive in the radiation, cold and darkness at the South Pole. "If the team's conclusions prove true, the discovery not only has important implications for the search for life in other extreme environments on Earth, but also for the possibility that life -- at least at the microscopic level -- may exist elsewhere in the solar system," the National Science Foundation (NSF) said on Thursday in a statement.
THERE was great excitement last week when news leaked out that a spacecraft has seen signs that water might have recently flowed on Mars's surface. But experts are puzzled by how water could be liquid in the frigid Martian climate and warn that concrete proof will be hard to come by. "If these results prove true, that there is water on Mars near the surface, it has profound implications for the possibility of life on Mars," NASA's associate administrator for space science Ed Weiler told a press conference in Washington DC last week. "Just about any place biologists find liquid water, organic molecules and energy, they find life, whether it's on the surface of the Earth or 10 000 feet below."
Just days after NASA's blockbuster announcement that liquid water may flow near the surface of Mars, scientists are rallying around the images -- and pondering the possibilities of life on Earth's neighboring planet. "When I saw those images, I said to myself that Ive seen them before in my Arctic field work," said James Rice, a geologist at the University of Arizonas Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. Rice trekked in 1997 and 1998 to the 12-mile (20-kilometer) diameter Haughton meteorite impact crater on Devon Island, located in the Canadian High Arctic.
NASA will announce next week that its Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has turned up evidence of water on the Red Planets surface, SPACE.com has learned. Sources close to the agencys Mars program said the find involves evidence of seasonal deposits that could be associated with springs on the planets surface.
NASA scientists have gone back to the garden, "planting" wireless webs of small sensors in gardens here on Earth in preparation for missions to help monitor biological activity on planets.
For decades, scientists have debated whether life on Mars is possible. Today, a team of UC Berkeley students will fly to a conference in Texas to present experimental evidence that demonstrates that liquid water may exist on the red planet a finding that leaves open the possibility of life as we known it outside of the Earth.
In 1976, two superbly designed robotic emissaries from the earth soft-landed on the rock-strewn surface of another world in search of life. After conducting three biology experiments, the American Viking missions to Mars concluded that they could neither confirm nor refute the presence of biological entities.
While Dr. Dan McCleese's description of the process whereby NASA is redesigning the future U.S. Mars program was one of the main attractions at this month's First Astrobiology Science Conference at Ames Research Center, there were many other talks and posters dealing with Mars as a possible abode of present-day -- or, more likely, past -- life.
The back-to-back failures last year of U.S. Mars missions now give scientists time to blueprint a credible and step-by-step search for life on the Red Planet. Without the pressure to return martian samples to Earth any time soon, new schemes for automated, on-the-spot detection of past or present Mars life can be flown.
It's been less than four years since jubilant scientists proclaimed they had detected fossils of ancient microorganisms from Mars. About the same time, new planets were spotted all over the sky, offering potential homes for alien civilizations. Tiny bugs were discovered in harsh environments on Earth previously considered impossible for creatures to survive in. The prospect of finding new neighbors in outer space seemed bright. But now a wave of pessimism is rising.
Two years ago, NASA took a chance and launched a new field of research christened "Astrobiology" with a bold Nobel laureate at the helm and about $10 million for research. This week, at the first ever Astrobiology Science Conference, NASA organizers were surprised when 600 scientists -- three times as many as expected -- showed up brimming with research papers, new ideas and enthusiasm about the questions of origins and evolution of life in the universe.
The word astrobiology may summon up images of boldly going in search of Vulcans or even more exotic aliens. You might think it has to do primarily with Mars, or Europa, or planets around other suns. But the fact is, Topic A in the rapidly growing field of astrobiology is good old Planet Earth.
Geologists at Washington University in St. Louis have developed new theoretical calculations on how life might have arisen on Earth, Mars and other celestial bodies from volcanic gases.
Could finding life on Mars be a biological show-stopper, a discovery that would slow down or even halt plans to send humans there? The issue of life on Mars serves as a double-edged sword, where scientific passion and ethics cuts both ways.
Two geology professors at The University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Robert L. Folk and Dr. Kitty L. Milliken, have demonstrated that iron oxide filaments from a variety of geological periods on Earth are lifelike in form at microscopic levels. They say their research could have implications for Martian exploration and the search for some form of life on other planets.
The surface of Mars could be littered with the chemical residues of life. Previous missions to the planet were simply not equipped to detect them, researchers claim.
Was there ever life on Mars? That question may one day be answered in part by research now being conducted by a University at Buffalo geologist who studies volcanoes on earth.
Lecture/book signing by Dead Mars, Dying Earth author John Brandenburg: Dead Mars, Dying Earth theorizes the comet responsible for gouging Mars' 120-mile wide Lyot impact crater 500 million years ago also blasted organic seed debris onto Earth, which in turn hastened the evolution of primitive aquatic life.
Was there ever life on Mars? That question may one day be answered in part by research now being conducted by a University at Buffalo geologist who studies volcanoes on earth.
Imagine a world of green slime, red goo and dripping, bacteria-rich mineral formations known fondly as "snottites." You are entering a little patch of underground heaven -- a subsurface step on the road to learning whether Mars is a locale for past or present life.
When planetary scientists first saw evidence of a water ocean beneath the frozen surface of Europa, everyone immediately began pondering the likelihood that the Jovian moon could harbor advanced life forms -- perhaps even fishlike creatures.
The main fascination about Mars has to do with the search for life beyond Earth.
Can bacteria leave fossils? Debate on this contentious question is central to the mystery of whether or not there is, or ever was, life on Mars. And it is a debate that has just re-opened, thanks to a report in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
Russian scientists claim to have discovered fossils of primitive extraterrestrial organisms in a meteorite thought to be a leftover from the formation of the solar system.
At a conference in Denver, July 20-22, 1999, a pair scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences presented sharp images that look very much like fossilized microorganisms taken from fragments of several carbonaceous meteorites.
The location and density of biologically useful energy sources on Mars will limit the biomass, spatial distribution, and organism size of any biota. Subsurface Martian organisms could be supplied with a large energy flux from the oxidation of photochemically produced atmospheric H2 and CO diffusing into the regolith.
It's a thought that grips most everyone who stares into the unfathomable depths of a star-speckled night: Is there anybody out there? The odds, say Peter Ward and Don Brownlee, are probably more remote than you think. Earth, they contend, is simply too special, the result of myriad physical conditions missing from most of the universe, with just enough time and other circumstances to let complicated life arise.
A primordial soup of complex organic chemicals that could be the precursors of life is cooked up very quickly after the birth of stars, new research suggests. Another international team has made calculations that suggest that life could have arisen on Mars and then been transferred to Earth by meteorites jolted away from the surface of Mars by asteroid impacts. Early in solar system history, it is also calculated that up a trillion Earth rocks were blasted into space and traveled to Mars. This means that life from Earth could have once seeded Mars. "Because of the heavy traffic between Earth and Mars, we couldn't decide which came first," Martian life on Earth, or the reverse, said Mileikowsky.
Astronomers reported on Wednesday they had found a tough but peaceful pair of bacteria that might have been able to survive the arduous trip from Mars, back when the Red Planet could have supported life.
Something astonishing has happened in the universe. There has arisen a thing called lifea flamboyant, rambunctious, gregarious form of matter, qualitatively different from rocks, gas, and dust, yet made of the same stuff, the same humdrum elements lying around everywhere.
Astrobiologists are to test whether life from Mars could have survived a journey to Earth by hiding inside meteorites. Scientists from the Stone group, including Professor Colin Pillinger of the Open University and Professor Howell Edwards at the University of Bradford, will send bacteria into space and back inside manmade 'meteorites' attached to the heat shield of a Russian space probe, Foton 12.
The search for how life began on Earth, and perhaps on other planets, is taking a detour in the endless night beneath the bottom of the sea.
Humble microbe could become "The Accidental (Space) Tourist" Like a muscle-bound movie hero, it withstands attacks from acid baths, high and low temperatures, and even radiation doses. Then, in a science fiction sequel, it dispenses lifesaving medications and reshapes a planet for new settlers.
British scientists interested in searching for life in space are getting together to launch the UK Astrobiology Forum. It will allow British astronomers, biologists, geologists and engineers to pool their knowledge, and think up better ways of detecting extra-terrestrials.
The earliest direct evidence of organisms pumping oxygen into Earth's ancient atmosphere has been found in the fossilized remnants of bacterial slime, according to research that also gives scientists a new tool in the hunt for life on Mars.
The discovery of living microbes just above a hidden freshwater lake 2 miles deep in the frozen Antarctic extends the range of extreme conditions under which life is known to survive. The finding, which researchers say almost certainly indicates there is a thriving community of microscopic creatures in the ancient, pristine lake, buoys hopes that life may exist elsewhere in the solar system. It also provides some clues about how and where to start looking.
The discovery of living microbes just above a hidden freshwater lake 2 miles deep in the frozen Antarctic extends the range of extreme conditions under which life is known to survive.
MOD: The Mars Organic Detector The Mars Organic Detector is designed to test martian soil samples for compounds associated with organic life. The detector, which would take up the volume of about a dozen CD cases stacked together, is provisionally budgeted for $3 million. It is designed to heat a rock sample to vaporize any organic compounds that might be inside.
[Video] Miles O'Brien interviews Dr Chris McKay, NASA Scientist and Mars Society member, on the search for life on Mars and in analogue environments here on Earth.
As the Mars Polar Lander spacecraft nears the Red Planet on its water- seeking mission, scientists are already discussing the societal implications of finding life elsewhere in the universe, a sign that a once-dubious idea has found new respectability.
SCIENTISTS have deciphered the genetic code of a bacterium which can withstand radiation at 3,000 times the level fatal to humans. Typically, it is found in locations where most other bacteria have died, ranging from the shielding pond of a radioactive caesium source to granite in the Antarctic, where conditions are thought to resemble those on Mars.
Suppose that billions of years ago life developed on Mars. Primitive, tiny organisms that thrived deep within rocks and made a living from water and chemicals seeping through those rocks.
NASA is assembling a group of scientists to determine just how to judge a little green man -- or at least a little, possibly green, bacterium from Mars.
Somewhere in Antarctica lie rocks that fell from outer space thousands or even millions of years ago. Inside them, scientists hope to find microscopic evidence of life on other planets.
Ongoing UT research adds another dimension to the theory that led NASA scientists to find evidence of life in a Mars meteorite.
A new study of the carbonate minerals found in a meteorite from Mars shows they were formed about 3.9 billion years ago. Scientists believe the planet had flowing surface water and warmer temperatures then, making it more Earth-like. Giant meteorites were blasting huge craters in its surface.
Scientists who proposed three years ago that a meteorite from Mars holds evidence of primitive martian life are thrilled by new research that sets the age of carbonate mineral deposits in the rock to 3.9 billion years old. The dating research, headed by Lars Borg, a geochemist at the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, is being lauded as the first to establish a reliable age for mineral processes that occurred after the formation of a meteorite. The research is published in this week's issue of the journal Science.
If life ever existed on Mars, it may have left behind a massive calling card in the shape of a white rock mound covering over 200 square kilometres. According to a team of researchers in Scotland and Turkey, the mound looks very like those built by bacteria over 3 billion years ago here on Earth.
Having found water in a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite, NASA scientists are searching for more that may have been overlooked in other space rocks. The water, locked in a purple crystalline mineral called halite - or rock salt - remained uncontaminated by the Earth's atmosphere because scientists studied the meteorite quickly, less than 46 hours after it fell, said Everett Gibson, the NASA scientist who retrieved the space rock last year from the West Texas town of Monahans.
Scientists who cracked open a meteorite that fell to Earth last year found tiny pockets of briny water, providing the first close look at water not originating on earth, according to an article in the journal Science. While astronomers have long thought that water flowed through asteroids and other bodies formed at the beginning of the solar system, the meteorite's liquid cargo offered the first chance to actually study it in a lab.
Surf's up in space. Thanks to new technologies, astronomers are finding water in the most unexpected nooks and crannies of the universe. The latest discovery, reported this week in the journal Science, is a tiny puddle of saltwater tucked inside a meteorite that plopped down in Texas last year - the first time liquid water has been recovered from an object from space.
When Michael Zolensky first saw the meteorite that had recently punched a crater in a west Texas road, it looked like a fairly common piece of space rock. "We didn't know it was unusual until we brought it into the lab, broke it open, and saw purple deposits," says Dr. Zolensky, curator of NASA's collection of cosmic dust and moon-rock samples.
A meteorite that whistled into a West Texas yard last year contained the first extraterrestrial water ever captured on Earth, scientists reported yesterday.
Three years after announcing that a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica held evidence of primitive life on Mars, a team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center says evidence continues to bolster that conclusion.
Deinococcus radiodurans -- listed as "world's toughest bacterium" in the Guinness Book of World Records -- may prove useful in future human missions to Mars, according to researchers.
Biologists have found life deep inside Earth's crust, and at thermal vents at the frigid bottom of the sea. Astrobiologists are now looking to Siberian permafrost for clues about how life on Earth may have begun and how it might start on other water-rich bodies of the solar system.
For all its achievements, science has also been spectacularly wrong, UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf shows in his new book, "Cradle of Life: The Discovery of Earth's Earliest Fossils" (Princeton University Press). Facts always prevail eventually -- but sometimes they don't emerge for decades.
The hunt for signs of ancient life on Mars leads scientists to Mono Lake, CA
The moon doesn't hold much promise for clay mineralogists. But Mars is a different story. With signs that water once flowed on its now-parched surface, the red planet could have the answer to one of the world's weightiest questions: Does life exist outside of Earth?
A University of Arkansas researcher has become the first scientist to grow methane-producing microorganisms under some of the conditions found on Mars. His work may provide clues for finding similar life forms on Mars.
A methane-making, oxygen-hating microbe is able to thrive in Mars-like laboratory conditions, according to a researcher who says the experiment raises fresh hope about the possibility of life on the Red Planet.
A University of Arkansas researcher has become the first scientist to grow methane-producing microorganisms under some of the conditions found on Mars. His work may provide clues for finding similar life forms on Mars.
NASA and Russian scientists have been selected to take the search for life in the solar system to the frozen reaches of Earth. Richard Hoover of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and Prof. Elena A. Vorobyova of Moscow State University will investigate the microbiota found in the permafrost and ice of Siberia, Alaska, and Antarctica.
Mars may once have bubbled with hot springs, warm cozy pools where Martian microbes could have evolved, according to a team of New Mexico researchers. Using data from NASA's Mars Pathfinder spacecraft, the scientists found chemicals in the Martian soil similar to what's found around hot springs on Earth.
The NASA scientist who claims to have found evidence of past life in three Martian meteorites made a bold prediction Tuesday: Real living creatures - not ancient microfossils - are buried deep beneath the windswept surface of Mars and eventually will be rooted out by robotic or human explorers.
Neil Armstrong received the glory as the first astronaut on the moon, but other earthlings actually beat him to the surface by two years. Stowaways on the Surveyor 3 spacecraft in 1967, a colony of the streptococcus mitus remained stranded on the moon until a rescue several years later by astronauts, who brought the harmless, common bacteria home where they were revived.
The most common form of life on Earth may be tiny forms of bacteria, if new research in Australia is confirmed. And right now they might be living on Mars, as well as in Earth rocks and even inside your body.
Scientists from NASA presented a paper today in Houston that suggests a meteorite from Mars, found here on Earth, may contain evidence of life from the Red Planet. If this seems like familiar news, well, it is and it isn't. The same scientists made an announcement back in 1996 about a Martian meteorite called ALH 84001 which was found in Antarctica.
A brown stone the size of a coconut has been identified as only the 14th known meteorite from Mars. It was picked up in the Dar al Gani region of the Libyan Sahara desert last year by an anonymous meteorite hunter.
The ALH84001 announcement at T+2 years: How well does this piece of Mars meet accepted criteria for evidence of ancient life? In August 1996, our research team made a rather profound claim: evidence of fossilized life found within a meteorite (ALH84001) blasted off the surface of Mars.
Scientists are about to reveal what may be the best evidence yet for past life in a rock from Mars. They hope it will cause their critics to pause for thought instead of dismissing their controversial claims.
Sensational new claims about life on Mars are about to be made by US scientists. Some of the researchers who claimed in 1996 to have found evidence for past life in a Martian meteorite now say they have further evidence to support their theories in one, possibly two, other rocks.
Unusual features found on a Martian meteorite may be those of fossilised alien bacteria after all, research suggests.
New research has boosted hopes of finding life on Mars. Data from a Nasa probe has revealed that enough heat from inside the Red Planet might be trapped at the poles to melt underground water ice.
Two planetary scientists have taken a novel approach to the question of life on Mars, calculating the amount of energy available for potentially life-sustaining chemical reactions. Their conclusion: There was enough energy for life to emerge, but not enough for it to flourish.
A meteorite found in the Sahara desert, dubbed Lucky 13, did come from Mars, British scientists have revealed. Meteorite experts said the findings could provide the next breakthrough in the search for evidence of life on the red planet.
Its been two years since scientists announced that they saw signs of ancient life in a Martian meteorite. At the time, they were confident that others would quickly confirm their results. Instead, the claims appear to be fading into the gray zone between proof and disproof.
UK scientists are hoping to make the next breakthrough in the search for evidence of life on Mars. They are analysing a small sample of a meteorite which landed in the Sahara desert.
NASA planetary scientist David McKay is a member of the research team that announced in 1996 that a Martian meteorite known as ALH84001 appeared to contain traces of biological activity. In an interview, McKay discusses the continuing search for evidence of life on Mars.
Lets get right down to it: Is there life on Mars? Most scientists say we just dont know. When will we find out? Some say well have to wait a decade, while others insist that the answer could be available significantly sooner.
The famous Martian meteorite, found in the Antartica - ALH84001, fcontains no biological life forms, according to a Case Western Reserve University researcher and colleagues.
Now we know how Robinson Crusoe must have felt. In the classic novel by Daniel Defoe, the shipwrecked mariner spent years on a remote island before he discovered a stranger's footprint in the sand. He wasn't alone after all.
On the morning after they said there might have been life on Mars, the man who predicted it a half-century ago answered every phone call with a groan. "Here we go. I suppose this is about Mars again," snarled Ray Bradbury, author of "The Martian Chronicles," a book describing a lush but dying red planet peopled by changelings. Now 75 and living in Los Angeles, prophet had turned skeptic.
A NASA research team of scientists at the Johnson Space Center and at Stanford University has found evidence that strongly suggests primitive life may have existed on Mars more than 3.6 billion years ago.
Space scientists won't say so, but the results of three brilliantly-conceived experiments lead inevitably to one startling conclusion: Life, in some form, exists on Mars. The results of the Viking life-detection experiments have been more positive than most people expected. Dr. Robert Jastrow, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says, "Short of seeing something wiggling on the end of a pin, the case for life on Mars is now as complete as the Viking experiments could make it." But no one wants to make predictions about Martian life which might be proved wrong by later evidence; scientific reputations could too easily be damaged in the process. So the Viking scientists have been extremely cautious in interpreting the results of their biology experiments. And the official NASA position straddles the fence. As Viking scientist Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University puts it, "We have clues up to the eyebrows, but no conclusive explanations of what we're seeing."