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: ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...