NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  1. Content with the tag: “mars life

  2. Seeking Life’s Imprint in Shifting Desert Sand


    Janet Siefert walks in a field of fossilized stromatolites, evidence of an ancient lagoon. Click image for larger view. Image credit: Leslie MullenJanet Siefert walks in a field of fossilized stromatolites, evidence of an ancient lagoon. Click image for larger view. Image credit: Leslie Mullen
    From the deepest past to the present day, the deserts of Morocco provide a panorama of life’s history on Earth and give us insight for our investigations of Mars. During a recent field trip to the Moroccan desert, scientists went fossil hunting in an ancient seabed that dates back to the Devonian Period, roughly 400 million years ago. What they found could help astrobiologists identify signs of life and interpret geological evidence of ancient, habitable environments on other planets.

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  3. A Tale of Two Deserts


    Atacama Desert
    All life as we know it needs water. But what organisms can survive when water is all but unavailable? To find out, one scientist is looking at soil from two of the driest places on Earth.

    Jocelyne DiRuggiero, an associate professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University, is studying the similarities and differences between the microbial communities that live in the Atacama desert and the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. The samples she is analyzing were collected by NASA teams, including the recent IceBite project funded by the Astrobiology Science & Technology for Exploring Planets (ASTEP) program....


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    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  4. Exposed Rocks Point to Water on Ancient Mars



    A carbonate-bearing rock deposit that was uplifted by an ancient meteor impact on Mars indicates that habitable environments may have existed deep below the martian crust. The discovery was made using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Researchers spotted the unique mineralogy in a crater located southwest of the giant volcanic province named Syrtis Major.

    Source: [Planetary Science Institute]

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  5. Mars Methane Lasts Less than a Year



    A new study indicates that methane in the atmosphere of Mars lasts less than a year. Methane is replenished from localized sources that show seasonal and annual variations. This pattern of methane production raises questions as to whether the methane comes from geological activity – or biological processes.

    Source: [European Planetary Science Congress]

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  6. Viking Results Revisited


    Viking 2 landerImage from the Viking 2 lander site. Credit: NASA
    Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise result from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA’s Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life. The findings could make a difference in how astrobiologists search for signs of past or present life on the red planet. The only organic chemicals identified when the Viking landers heated samples of Martian soil were chlorine compounds interpreted as contaminants from cleaning fluids. But those chemicals are exactly what researchers found when adding perchlorate (the surprise finding from Phoenix) to desert soil from Chile.

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  7. IceBite Blog: Learning to Respect the Weather


    NASA’s IceBite project will spend three austral summers in Antarctica testing ice-penetrating drills for a future mission to Mars. A team of seven scientists is in Antarctica now for the first field season, installing scientific probes in the ice and frozen ground, and scouting for sites where the drills will be tested the following year. Team member, Margarita Marinova, is writing a blog of the team’s activities. In this first set of entries, she describes preparations for deployment to the field. In addition, readers can now send questions directly to the scientists as they explore Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys.

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  8. The Meandering Channels of Mars


    Sinuous channels on the Martian surface may be evidence of relatively recent rainfall. Researchers funded by NASA’s Mars Fundamental Research Program plan to test this hypothesis by studying sinuous streams on Earth.

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  9. Roving the AMASEing Arctic


    The 2009 AMASE expedition in now underway on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. Members of the expedition team are providing updates on scientific activities as they test technologies for future Mars missions in the harsh, arctic terrain. The primary goal of the AMASE team is to develop methods to search for life on other planets in our solar system, such as Mars.

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  10. Wanted: Easy-Going Martian Roommates


    Mars is not for the finicky. If something does live there, it’s likely going to be similar to the more adaptive life forms on our planet. A group of researchers is studying a particular microbe that they think could be a model for Mars life.

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  11. Phoenix Results Point to Climate Cycles


    Phoenix Scoop
    The first major peer-reviewed reports on the finding of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission have been published in the journal Science. The reports show how favorable chemistry and episodes of liquid water could have made the Phoenix landing site habitable for microbes in Mars’ past. In fact, it is possible that the site could become habitable again in Mars’ future according to Phoenix Principal Investigator, Peter Smith (ASU).

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  12. A New Way to Keep Clean


    It is almost impossible to get a spacecraft completely clean before launch. Therefore, missions to other planets carry some risk of forward contamination – where microorganisms from Earth travel along with the spacecraft to its destination. This is a big problem in the search for life on planets like Mars, because you don’t want to contaminate the site you’re going to be studying. To help combat this problem, a team of scientists funded by a NASA ASTEP award have developed a new cleaning protocol that could be used for future missions to Mars and beyond.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  13. Windy, Wet and Wild


    The team behind NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers has released new results from the two years that Opportunity spent exploring Victoria Crater. Opportunity’s instruments have revealed more evidence for a windy and wet past on Mars. The findings further our understanding of the habitability of ancient Mars.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  14. Too Salty to Freeze


    Phoenix Scoop
    Liquid water has been detected and photographed for the first time on Mars. Researchers have identified salty, liquid water on a leg of NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander. The discovery means that previous assumptions that water could only exist as ice and vapor on Mars due to the planet’s surface temperature and pressure may be incorrect.

    The team from the University of Michigan believes that the droplets are highly salty water that splashed onto Phoenix’s leg when the spacecraft’s landing jets melted ice just below the martian surface. The mud droplets appeared to grow over time as they absorbed...


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    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  15. Water May Have Shaped Solar System's Tallest Mountain



    Using computer modeling, researchers have determined that Mars’ Olympus Mons volcano – the tallest mountain in the solar system – may have formed on a bed of clay and sediments. The researchers believe that pockets of ancient water may still be trapped beneath the mountain, potentially creating an environment suitable for life.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  16. Methane-Spewing Martians?




    A research team, funded as part of the Astrobiology Science and Technology Instrument Development and Mission Concept Studies (ASTID), is building optical devices that may help scientists understand if methane on Mars could be a sign of life. The recent discovery of methane in the atmosphere of Mars raised the question of whether or not the gas could be produced by living organisms. The team hopes their instruments will be able to measure isotopic abundances in methane signatures that could distinguish a biological origin from a geological one.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  17. MSL Delayed


    NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) will no longer launch in October of 2009 due to testing and hardware challenges that must be addressed in order to ensure a successful mission. The mission has been pushed back to 2011, when MSL will carry a science payload ten times larger than NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers to the martian surface. On Mars, MSL will study the martian environment and will help astrobiologists determine if Mars was once habitable for life as we know it.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  18. Buried Martian Glaciers



    NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has discovered vast glaciers of water ice that are protected beneath blankets of rocky debris on Mars. The glaciers are also present at much lower latitudes than any ice previously identified on the red planet. The discovery is helping scientists understand the past climate of Mars, and could help them determine if the planet was once a suitable habitat for life.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  19. A Divining Rod for Mars


    Mars may have water underground but exactly where it is located is not known. An instrument on the Mars Science Laboratory will use neutrons to help spy for the water.

    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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