Has Kepler Found Ideal SETI-Target Planets?

NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered a new planetary system that is home to five small planets around a slightly smaller star than our Sun. Two of them are super-Earth planets, most likely made of rock or ice mixed with rock, which are located in the habitable zone of their host star. This discovery is providing a target for the SETI search, since if life has thrived on these worlds and reached a point where civilization has developed complex technology, it may be detectable.

When the NASA Kepler mission was launched on March 9, 2007, the Delta II rocket was carrying the hope of a large community of scientists who dedicate their work to studying extra-solar planets, planets in orbit around other stars. The Kepler mission’s main scientific objective is exploration of the structure and diversity of planetary systems. It accomplishes this goal by staring almost constantly at a large field composed of about 150,000 stars to detect small dips in brightness due to the transits of a planet.

Full Story: http://www.seti.org/seti_kepler_62

NASA Team Investigates Complex Chemistry At Titan

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

A laboratory experiment at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., simulating the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought. The results now point out another region on the moon that could brew up prebiotic materials. The paper was published in Nature Communications this week.

“Scientists previously thought that as we got closer to the surface of Titan, the moon’s atmospheric chemistry was basically inert and dull,” said Murthy Gudipati, the paper’s lead author at JPL. “Our experiment shows that’s not true. The same kind of light that drives biological chemistry on Earth’s surface could also drive chemistry on Titan, even though Titan receives far less light from the sun and is much colder. Titan is not a sleeping giant in the lower atmosphere, but at least half awake in its chemical activity.”

Scientists have known since NASA’s Voyager mission flew by the Saturn system in the early 1980s that Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has a thick, hazy atmosphere with hydrocarbons, including methane and ethane. These simple organic molecules can develop into smog-like, airborne molecules with carbon-nitrogen-hydrogen bonds, which astronomer Carl Sagan called “tholins.”

Full Story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-120
Also: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/titan20130403.html

ExoMars: ESA And Roscosmos Set For Mars Missions

ESA and the Russian federal space agency, Roscosmos, have signed a formal agreement to work in partnership on the ExoMars programme towards the launch of two missions in 2016 and 2018.

Establishing whether life ever existed on Mars is one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time and the highest scientific priority of the ExoMars programme.

The partners have agreed a balanced sharing of responsibilities for the different mission elements. ESA will provide the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) and the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module (EDM) in 2016, and the carrier and rover in 2018.

Roscosmos will be responsible for the 2018 descent module and surface platform, and will provide launchers for both missions. Both partners will supply scientific instruments and will cooperate closely in the scientific exploitation of the missions.

Full Story: http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/ExoMars_ESA_and_Roscosmos_set_for_Mars_missions

NASA Rover Finds Conditions Once Suited For Ancient Life On Mars

An analysis of a rock sample collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes.

Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — some of the key chemical ingredients for life — in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.

“A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. “From what we know now, the answer is yes.”

Clues to this habitable environment come from data returned by the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments. The data indicate the Yellowknife Bay area the rover is exploring was the end of an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbes.

Full Story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-092#1

Groundwater-Fed Martian Lake Could Contain Clues To A Subsurface Biosphere

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

The subsurface environment on Mars may hold clues to the origin of life, scientists argue in a recently published research article led by Planetary Science Institute’s Joseph Michalski. A large fraction of the life on Earth may exist as microbes deep underground on our home planet. The same could have been true in the past on Mars.

“Recent results produced by several authors using data from the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars instrument aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have shown that the subsurface of Mars was widely altered by subsurface water” Michalski said. “Here, we argue that all of the ingredients for life existed in the subsurface, and it may have been the most habitable part of Mars.”

Full Story: http://www.psi.edu/news/press-releases#michalskilake
Also: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-028
Images: http://www.psi.edu/news/press-releases/michalski_012013

Can Life Emerge On Planets Around Cooling Stars?

Astronomers find planets in strange places and wonder if they might support life. One such place would be in orbit around a white or brown dwarf. While neither is a star like the sun, both glow and so could be orbited by planets with the right ingredients for life.

No terrestrial, or Earth-like planets have yet been confirmed orbiting white or brown dwarfs, but there is no reason to assume they don’t exist. However, new research by Rory Barnes of the University of Washington and René Heller of Germany’s Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam hints that planets orbiting white or brown dwarfs will prove poor candidates for life.

White dwarfs are the hot cores of dead stars and brown dwarfs are failed stars, objects not massive enough to start nuclear burning as the sun does. In theory, both can be bright enough to theoretically support a habitable zone — that swath of space just right for an orbiting planet’s surface water to be in liquid form, thus giving life a chance.

White and brown dwarfs share a common characteristic that sets them apart from normal stars like the sun: They slowly cool and become less luminous over time. And as they cool, their habitable zones gradually shrink inward. Thus, a planet that is found in the center of the habitable zone today must previously have spent time near the zone’s deadly inner edge.

Full Story: http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/11/19/can-life-emerge-on-planets-around-cooling-stars/

Slow-Moving Rocks Improve Oodds That Life Crashed To Earth From Space

Microorganisms that crashed to Earth embedded in the fragments of distant planets might have been the sprouts of life on this one, according to new research presented at the European Planetary Sciences Congress (EPSC) on 25 September.

The researchers report that under certain conditions there is a high probability that life came to Earth — or spread from Earth to other planets — during the Solar System’s infancy when Earth and its planetary neighbours orbiting other stars would have been close enough to each other to exchange lots of solid material.

The findings provide the strongest support yet for lithopanspermia, the hypothesis that basic life forms are distributed throughout the Universe via meteorite-like planetary fragments cast forth by disruptions such as volcanic eruptions and collisions with objects such as asteroids.

Full Story: http://www.europlanet-eu.org/outreach/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=382&Itemid=41

Slow-Moving Rocks Better Odds That Life Crashed To Earth From Space

Microorganisms that crashed to Earth embedded in the fragments of distant planets might have been the sprouts of life on this one, according to new research from Princeton University, the University of Arizona and the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) in Spain.

The researchers report in the journal Astrobiology that under certain conditions there is a high probability that life came to Earth — or spread from Earth to other planets — during the solar system’s infancy when Earth and its planetary neighbors orbiting other stars would have been close enough to each other to exchange lots of solid material.

The findings provide the strongest support yet for “lithopanspermia,” the idea that basic life forms are distributed throughout the universe via meteorite-like planetary fragments cast forth by disruptions such as volcanic eruptions and collisions with other matter. Eventually, another planetary system’s gravity traps these roaming rocks, which can result in a mingling that transfers any living cargo.

Full Story: http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S34/82/42M30/

Mars-Like Places On Earth Give New Insights Into Rover Data And Conditions For Life

Life thrives on Planet Earth. In even the most inhospitable places – the freezing Antarctic permafrost, sun-baked saltpans in Tunisia or the corrosively acidic Rio Tinto in Spain – pockets of life can be found. Some of these locations have much in common with environments found on Mars, as discovered by orbiters and rovers exploring the surface. Researchers from the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) in Madrid have made a series of field trips to the most Mars-like places on Earth. Today, they presented some of their findings during a press conference at the European Planetary Science Congress in Madrid.

Dr Felipe Goméz, the project leader said, “The big questions are: what is life, how can we define it and what are the requirements for supporting life? To understand the results we receive back from missions like Curiosity, we need to have detailed knowledge of similar environments on Earth. Metabolic diversity on Earth is huge. In the field campaigns, we have studied ecosystems in situ and we have also brought samples back to the laboratory for further analysis. We have found a range of complex chemical processes that allow life to survive in unexpected places.”

Full Story: http://www.europlanet-eu.org/outreach/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=381&Itemid=1

Researchers Brew Up Organics On Ice

Would you like icy organics with that? Maybe not in your coffee, but researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are creating concoctions of organics, or carbon-bearing molecules, on ice in the lab, then zapping them with lasers. Their goal: to better understand how life arose on Earth.

In a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the research team provides the first direct look at the organic chemistry that takes place on icy particles in the frigid reaches of our solar system, and in the even chillier places between stars. Scientists think that the basic ingredients of life, including water and organics, began their journey to Earth on these lonesome ice particles. The ice and organics would have found their way into comets and asteroids, which then fell to Earth, delivering “prebiotic” ingredients that could have jump-started life.

Full Story: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-293