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Viewing Extraterrestrial Life Category
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.
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.  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.
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.
"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.
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.
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. 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. |
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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.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
