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Washington Post Covers Astrobiology
In yesterday’s edition of the Washington Post, writer Marc Kauffman discusses the “…scientific explosion taking place in astrobiology.”
July 21, 2008 / Posted by: Daniella Scalice
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Is There Life on Mars? Ask a Magnet.
Between three and four billion years ago, Mars was a lot like Earth. Both planets are believed to have had surface water. Those similarities make it a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life. “The assumption is that if bacterial life emerged on Earth at that time, then why not on Mars?” says Soon Sam Kim, principal member of technical staff...May 5, 2008 / Written by: James Kling
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NASA’s Wine Sniffer
“I admit I never actually wrote this goal into my grant,” UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry Richard Mathies told me, as one of his graduate students injected a drop of Zinfandel into Mathies’s organic analyzer. “But it is an important demonstration” that the detector actually works.
The device in Mathies’s lab is a prototype of the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA). Along with several other components, MOA has been selected by NASA to be part of the Urey instrument...
March 3, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman
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New Astrobiology Roadmap Due in '08
A team of NASA and external representatives of the science community is in the process of updating NASA’s 2003 astrobiology roadmap. A draft revised roadmap, to be finalized later in 2008, is publicly available for review and comment online here.
The last iteration of the roadmap was issued in September 2003. The fundamental questions framing the roadmap – How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? What is the future of life on Earth...
February 13, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Astrobiology Prospects ROSE-y
The Astrobiology Program has a bigger budget in fiscal year (FY) 2008 (which began October 1, 2007) than it did for FY 2007, thanks to NASA Associate Administrator for Science Alan Stern and Planetary Sciences Division Director Jim Green. In one of his first actions at NASA, Stern allocated $1 million of his discretionary funds to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) to provide for continuity of membership beyond calendar year 2008. In additional action, Green allocated...
February 13, 2008 / Written by: Linda Billings
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ASTID Goes to Mars!
This outgrowth of flight instrument development from astrobiology program support follows in the footsteps of two instruments on the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), scheduled for launch in 2009. Both CheMin, the Chemistry & Mineralogy X-Ray Diffraction/X-Ray Fluorescence Instrument, and SAM, the Sample Analysis at Mars Instrument Suite with Gas Chromatograph, Mass Spectrometer, and Tunable Laser Spectrometer, had ASTID program support before they were successfully proposed for flight on MSL.
November 12, 2007 / Posted by: Shige Abe
