If the polar ice caps on Mars were to melt, the water would cover the entire surface of the planet to a depth of eleven metres. That's the conclusion drawn from data sent back by the Mars Express probe, which over the course of 300 orbits mapped the glaciers at Mars' south pole and found them to be composed of nearly pure water. Parts of Mars are believed to have been covered by liquid water in the past, and learning what happened to that water could hold the key to finding out if Mars may have at one time supported life.
Source: Paul Rincon, Polar water 'would blanket Mars.' BBC News, March 16. Photo of Mars' north pole by NASA.

Those of us who live here know the Earth's surface is teeming with life. But if an outsider dropped a probe at random and scooped up a few handfuls of dirt -- and their probe happened to land in the Chilean desert -- they might conclude that the Blue Planet is a lifeless rock. Now a group of Mexican scientists say this is what we Earthlings may have done with Mars. The scientists took soil from some of the Earth's most arid places and used it to repeat the experiments done by the 1976 Viking probe, which sifted the Martian sands for signs of life. The experiments concluded that these places -- actually home to numerous organisms -- were devoid of life. The scientists' conclusion? There may not be life on Mars, but if there is, we missed it.

Source: Viking Mission May Have Missed Life on Mars, Study Finds. National Geographic News, October 23.

Since the very beginning of time, humankind has been obsessed with the idea of life on other planets. We have spent unimaginable sums of money trying to find out what else lies beyond our planet and trying to make contact with other forms of intelligent life. The answers we’ve got have been few and slow coming, but we have made some remarkable discoveries along the way.
One of the most exciting discoveries made in our quest to find alien life is the discovery of some of the first building blocks of life as we know it. These building blocks were found on two different moons that revolve around the planet Saturn. Titan and Enceladus both show the potential for producing life if only they were a little warmer for life to survive.
Enceladus was first discovered in 1789 by Frederick William Herschel. Since then no a lot of information about this moon has been uncovered until recently. We know that it is one of only three moons in the solar system to produce observed active eruptions of gases. The exciting thing about this little moon is the presence of ice formed by water. Spacecrafts have observed that Enceladus reflects almost 100% of the sunlight that hits it because of the ice and there are even little water geysers and fountains in various places on the moons surface.
Even more promising than the water found on Enceladus is the materials found on the larger of Saturn’s moons, Titan. Scientists believe that the atmosphere surrounding Titan is very similar to the atmosphere of Earth before life put oxygen into the air. The atmospheric pressure near the surface is almost 60 times greater than that of Earth today. The air on Titan is made up of hydrocarbons and nitrogen which give the planet it’s pretty orange hue and are the building blocks for most amino acids that are needed to form life.
Another fascinating aspect of the planet Titan is the disputed existence of rivers on the moons surface containing methane and ethane. Scientists are all in agreement that the moon does have rivers and lakes running on it very similar to those on earth which contain water, but there is some disagreement to what Titan’s rivers actually contain. It is in general agreement that the contents consist of more hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane, which are used to make natural gas on Earth, but some scientists do not believe that there is actually methane in liquid form included in this mix. Either way its still an intriguing thought that the first pieces of life all seem to be present somewhere other than our planet. Of course we probably won’t be seeing any big-eyed green creatures any time soon. The temperature on both planets is still far too cold for any life to grow or survive.

With plans to set up a permanent colony on the moon, the human race is finally realising its dreams of space colonization. But why stop at our nearest neighbour? Plans are already under way for much bolder schemes. The next step after the moon, and the goal of many a piece of science fiction, is to visit Mars. Unlike the moon, a human has yet to step foot on Mars, let alone consider setting up a permanent base there. Despite this, plans are already underway for the colonization of space. There are many reasons for wanting to create settlements on other bodies in the solar system, ranging from short term concerns over the survival of our own ecosystem to the long term problem of overcrowding. Whether or not we have to deal with these problems soon, space exploration will continue to go ahead.

For the first time since the Viking missions 30 years ago, NASA is sending a probe to scratch the surface of Mars. The new spacecraft, called Phoenix, is scheduled to launch in August of this year, and will dig up soil samples in the planet's polar region. Scientists hope that on-board analysis of the ice-packed dirt will reveal chemicals that could have made life possible, though they have few expectations of finding actual life.

Peter Smith, chief scientist for the mission, told reporters, "There's always some remote possibility of life existing there even now, but Phoenix might be landing 10 feet away from it, and we'd never know it."
Source: David Perlman, Next Mars lander, Phoenix, will dig into icy surface. San Francisco Chronicle, February 2. Photo by NASA.

It is almost one year since the 'New Horizons' mission left earth, bound for Pluto. The spacecraft will spend six months studying Jupiter. New Horizon has been able to for the first time get a first closeup shot of 'the little red spot, recently formed.
"This is an unprecedented opportunity," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., said in an interview with Discovery News. "It's never been done on a giant planet before."
Discovery News writes about the fascination for Jupiter, which revolves around it's icy moons, powerful magnetic field and turbulent atmosphere. A previous mission, 'Galileo' who was only able to transmit limited data, did show evidence of an ocean on the third largest moon, Callisto, under it's ice covered crust.

This mission will also include instrument training on Jupiter's other moons, Io, Europa and Ganymede. A faulty main antenna, limited the data Galileo relayed back to Earth. That mission ended in 2003. It is expected New Horizon's high-speed communications system will relay detailed information about the giant moons. It is known, Io has active volcanoes and Europa is thought to have an underground as well as maybe a life bearing sea.

A satellite probe launched today in Kazakhstan will spend the next few years searching the skies for small, rocky planets orbiting stars in the "Goldilocks zone," where light intensity is just right for supporting life. The search must be conducted from space, scientists say, because distortion from Earth's atmosphere makes ground-based telescopes unable to see anything but huge planets--gas giants like Jupiter. The probe is expected to find between 10 and 50 planets, many of which could be capable of supporting life. The planets would be too far away for us to visit in the foreseeable future, but the search will give scientists an idea of how often such planets form.

Source: Ian Sample, Planet-hunter searches for second Earth. The Guardian, December 28.

Photo from Mosnews.com

If you chanced to be among the handful of visitors wandering the lava-strewn landscape of northeastern California on July 18, 2006, you might have seen the preamble to what could be a very giant leap for mankind. In the dusty pastures edging the town of Hat Creek, in the northern shadow of moldering Mt. Lassen, ten antennas revved their motors, and panned the sky. They were making their debut as the first working elements of the Allen Telescope Array.

This new instrument which when completed will brandish 350 antennas, can speed up the search for signals from other societies by hundreds of times and more. Compared to earlier efforts, it will turn SETI on its metal ear. We're not talking about the difference between a Lexus and a Toyota; we're talking about the difference between a Lexus and an oxcart.

In the next two dozen years, the Allen Telescope Array will parse the nearest thousand light-years of space. If there are other occupants of this galactic neighborhood, we could turn up a signal.

But then what? Would the discovery be put under wraps, either voluntarily or by government edict? If we found a signal, would you know?

This is among the most commonly asked questions of SETI: what happens in case of a detection. Conditioned by television, movies, and a penchant for expecting conspiracy, a lot of people think that the truth would not be out there. They believe it entirely reasonable to expect that the military, worried that the aliens will threaten the planet, would surround the telescope with chain link, and redirect the data stream to the Pentagon. Another common assumption is that the government, figuring that the citizenry will lose its cool, stampede the streets, and provoke a seismic collapse of polite society, will keep the discovery under wraps. Some even venture the thought that SETI scientists, for unspecified (and hard to imagine) reasons, would deprive themselves of future funding and the Nobel Prize by squirreling away their find...

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.


Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.

Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

The best article so far on the the "red rain" phenomenon is in New Scientist. The Observer had a decent article too. An Indian scientist, Dr. Godfrey Louis, thinks the red particles found in the rain are the remnants of a meteorite that exploded. He further thinks that they might be extraterrestrial life forms.

The New Scientist article linked to his full-length paper that is to appear in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science. Intrigued, I took a look at his paper. It is surprisingly readable considering it's meant for a journal.

The paper has lots of very interesting photos (New Scientist published one -- the only pic in the paper that was in color). I have cut-n-pasted the photos from the paper below. They are pretty amazing and deserve wide exposure.

I think the story is being under-reported. Massive investigations into this "red rain" will probably settle the question about whether extraterrestrial life exists, but I don't see much urgency on this.