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Project Progress

The meeting held during July 2007 in San Juan Puerto Rico hosted 234 participants, for which there were 19 invited talks, 57 contributed oral talks and 113 poster presentations. The conference was organized around four broad themes: the origin of prebiotic material in space and delivery to the earth, investigation of the habitable worlds in the solar system and the building blocks of life, the origin of early life and its co-evolution with the environment and extrasolar planets and biosignatures. The proceedings were edited by members from several NAI teams, in include 60 papers organized into the following sections: * How Early Could Life Originate in the Universe [5 papers] * The Nature of Interstellar Organics [5 papers] * Organic Material in Comets, Meteorites, and IDPs [2 papers] * Life in the Outer Solar system [1 paper] * Mars as a Setting for Life [4 papers] * Space Missions to Comets: Stardust and Deep Impact [1 paper] * Prebiotic Chemistry [4 papers] * Origins of Viruses and Cellular function [2 papers] * Life in Extreme Environments [7 papers] * Co-Evolution of Life and the Environment on Early Earth [2 papers] * Life Beyond (or Without) the Earth [1 paper] * Extrasolar Planets / Planet Formation [6 papers] * Habitable planets and their Stars [4 papers] * Biosignatures [2 papers] * SETI [8 papers] * Education and Outreach [4 papers]

In addition, the book includes the Astrobiology glossary that was developed for the meeting, and which is being maintained as a resource for the astrobiology community by NAI central. The book, which has a publication date of 2009, will be shipped in early 2010.