Three billion years ago, Earth was a very different place.
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Back to the Surface: NASA’s 2003 Mission to Mars
What role did liquid water play in shaping the surface of Mars? The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) currently in orbit around the Red Planet has provided strong visual evidence that water once flowed on Mars, cutting deep channels, pooling in lakes, perhaps even filling the Northern third of Mars with a vast ocean. But probing the question more deeply requires landing and taking a look around.
That is precisely what NASA hopes to do in 2003. The space agency recently announced plans to launch two rovers, one in May and the other in June of 2003. The two will land ...
December 07, 2000 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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NASA Astrobiology Architect, Dr. Gerald Soffen, Remembered
NASA Scientist Dr. Gerald Soffen, who led the Viking science team that performed the first experiments on the surface of the planet Mars and a guiding force in NASA’s effort to search for life in the Universe, died Nov. 22 at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC. He was 74.
A close advisor to NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin, Soffen helped shape NASA’s Astrobiology program, the study of life in the Universe. Soffen also was instrumental in the
establishment of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, a virtual organization comprising NASA Centers, universities and research organizations dedicated to studying ...December 04, 2000 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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Leonid Meteors Yield Rich Astrobiology Research Results
Text based on a NASA/Ames Press Release
A team of NASA researchers and their collaborators report their findings from last year’s Leonid meteor storm in a special issue of the journal “Earth, Moon and Planets.”
The scientists – all members of the NASA and U.S. Air Force-sponsored Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign – discussed their results in a series of astrobiology-related papers in the peer-reviewed journal. While their findings covered a range of areas, the key results reported have implications for the existence and survival of life’s precursors in comet materials that reach Earth.
“Last year’s Leonid meteor ...
November 27, 2000 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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Life Under Bombardment
No-one knows when life first established a firm foothold on Earth. Ask around in the scientific community, though, and you’ll probably hear that the surface of early Earth, before about 3.8 billion years ago, was too hostile an environment for even a lowly microbe to set up shop.
The main problem, as the conventional argument goes, was that between around 4.1 and 3.8 billion years ago, Earth was constantly being bombarded by comets and asteroids. The disastrous effects of these impacts would have rendered the Earth’s surface uninhabitable.
Not necessarily so, say a team of astrobiologists who ...
November 27, 2000 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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Mars Lakes
Nathalie Cabrol, who has spent many long hours poring over images of Mars taken from orbiting spacecraft, believes those images contain convincing evidence that lakes were present on Mars in the recent past.
“Recent” requires some definition when you’re talking to geologists. In this case, it means some time in the past half a billion years or so, give or take a couple hundred million. There are no lakes present on the Martian surface today.
Cabrol, a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) and a principal investigator with the SETI Institute, works at NASA’s Ames Research Center in ...
November 27, 2000 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue