Jupiter's Icy Moon Europa: Best Bet for Alien Life

Under a thick crust of ice, Europa might have an ocean warmed by tidal interactions with Jupiter. 

This tidal flexing could also produce a geologically active core that might in turn create hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Ted Stryk

Jupiter's moon Europa doesn't look like a particularly inviting place for life to thrive; the icy satellite is nearly 500 million miles (800 million kilometers) from the sun, on average.

But beneath its icy crust lies a liquid ocean with more water than Earth contains. This ocean is shielded from harmful radiation, making Europa one of the solar system's best bets to host alien life.

That's one of the reasons Europa is so alluring to scientists. It has all the elements thought to be key for the origin of life: water, energy, and organic chemicals, the carbon-containing building blocks of life, scientists said at an event called "The Lure of Europa," held here last month.

"All the ingredients are there to make us think Europa is the next place to go," NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan said at the event, which was organized by the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization headed by scientist and TV host Bill Nye.



Just as a layer of ice over a pond allows the water beneath it to stay liquid through the freezing winter, Europa's icy crust shields its enormous ocean despite the moon's great distance from the sun.

As Europa travels around Jupiter, the massive planet bends and flexes the satellite, generating interior heat that keeps its water from freezing completely.

Beneath Europa's surface, active volcanoes may also heat the water, providing vents where bacterial life may thrive as it does on Earth.

"With that combination of volcanism and water, good things are going to happen," Stofan said.

Lone Signal Project Begins Beaming Your Messages Into Deep Space

CREDIT: Lone Signal Media

In 18 years, messages beamed out into space from Earth by a new alien-messaging project Monday (June 17) will reach a distant star system known as Gliese 526.

Officials with the Lone Signal project — a newly launched website designed to send user-written notices to any extraterrestrials who may receive them — hope that their messages might open the first dialogue between Earth and other intelligent life forms.

One of the company's first message beamed to the Gliese 526 system, located 17.6 light-years from Earth was sent by famous futurist Ray Kurzweil and reads: "Greetings to Gliese 526 from Singularity University."

"As you receive this, our computers have made us smarter, the better to understand you and the wisdom of the universe…"

"This signal, in 19 hours, will go farther than the Voyager spacecraft has in 40 years," Jason Silva, the host of "Brain Games" on the National Geographic Channel said.

He spoke to a crowd of fashion models, businessmen and a handful of scientists in downtown Manhattan honouring Lone Signal's launch on Monday.

The Jamesburg Earth Station will be responsible for transmitting the messages contributed to the Lone Signal project.

Alien Invasion - A matter of scale! - Video

Centraal Beheer Achmea Insurance: UFO by hourigan

Search for Life Suggests Alien Solar Systems More Habitable than Ours

Scattered around the Milky Way are stars that resemble our own sun—but a new study is finding that any planets orbiting those stars may very well be hotter and more dynamic than Earth.

That’s because the interiors of any terrestrial planets in these systems are likely warmer than Earth—up to 25 percent warmer, which would make them more geologically active and more likely to retain enough liquid water to support life, at least in its microbial form.

The preliminary finding comes from geologists and astronomers at Ohio State University who have teamed up to search for alien life in a new way.

They studied eight “solar twins” of our sun—stars that very closely match the sun in size, age, and overall composition—in order to measure the amounts of radioactive elements they contain.

Those stars came from a dataset recorded by the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher spectrometer at ESA's European Southern Observatory in Chile.

They searched the solar twins for elements such as thorium and uranium, which are essential to Earth’s plate tectonics because they warm our planet’s interior.

Plate tectonics helps maintain water on the surface of the Earth, so the existence of plate tectonics is sometimes taken as an indicator of a planet’s hospitality to life.

Of the eight solar twins they’ve studied so far, seven appear to contain much more thorium than our sun—which suggests that any planets orbiting those stars probably contain more thorium, too.

That, in turn, means that the interior of the planets are probably warmer than ours.

“If it turns out that these planets are warmer than we previously thought, then we can effectively increase the size of the habitable zone around these stars by pushing the habitable zone farther from the host star, and consider more of those planets hospitable to microbial life,” said Ohio State doctoral student Cayman Unterborn, who presented the results at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this week.

“At this point, all we can say for sure is that there is some natural variation in the amount of radioactive elements inside stars like ours,” he added.

“With only nine samples including the sun, we can’t say much about the full extent of that variation throughout the galaxy. But from what we know about planet formation, we do know that the planets around those stars probably exhibit the same variation, which has implications for the possibility of life.”

His advisor, Wendy Panero, associate professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State, explained that radioactive elements such as thorium, uranium, and potassium are present within Earth’s mantle. These elements heat the planet from the inside, in a way that is completely separate from the heat emanating from Earth’s core.


Read more of this article at scienceblog.com

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity: Complex Chemistry at Rocknest

This is a view of the third (left) and fourth (right) trenches made by the 1.6-inch-wide scoop on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity in October 2012. 

The image shows some of the properties of the "Rocknest" wind drift sand. The upper surface of the drift is covered by coarse sand grains approximately 0.02 to 0.06 inches in size. Beneath the crust surface is finer sand, which is darker brown.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity can’t yet confirm any organic compounds on the Red Planet, NASA scientists said today--but the rover is seeing some intriguing chemicals, which will lead to further careful analysis about whether its home in Gale Crater could have played host to life.

“SAM has no definitive detection to report of organic compounds,” said Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator for the SAM instrument, which stands for Sample Analysis at Mars.

The instrument did see some carbon-containing material--it’s just not clear whether the carbon in it comes from Mars, or whether Curiosity toted it from Earth.

What’s more, at least some of the detected material was most likely created in chemical reactions inside Curiosity’s belly, as the SAM instrument’s oven baked sand samples.

The results mark the first soil sample analysis from the SAM lab suite, the most complex chemistry lab ever sent to another world. “We really consider this a terrific milestone,” Mahaffy said at a news conference Monday.

The presence of perchlorate may be the biggest news from the press conference, which kicked off the day at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco.

The Mars Phoenix lander also saw evidence of this chlorine-oxygen compound, which could conceivably be used as an energy source by Martian microbes.

The analysis of these chemicals--which involves baking samples inside SAM’s oven and measuring the vapors that come out--in and of itself created new chemicals which the sensitive instruments picked up. Among those newly formed chemicals were some chlorinated methane compounds.

The chlorine is from Mars, Mahaffy said. The carbon’s origin is still unclear. Scientists will try to figure it out by measuring isotope ratios and making other measurements.

Other results from Curiosity’s first few months on Mars include some analysis of the soil and rocks, which are apparently very similar in both chemical composition and appearance to rocks in other spots on the planet.

The Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity rovers saw very similar soil in different locations. At Curiosity’s present location, Rocknest, a site in Gale Crater, the soil is about half volcanic material and half crystalline materials, like glass.

Interestingly, the water bound up in this soil is much, much heavier than water in Earth’s oceans, Mahaffy said.

Scientists, Curiosity followers and Marsphiles around the world eagerly awaited Monday’s announcement because of earlier rumours and speculation that the rover team was about to share something “Earth-shaking.”

Curiosity is not designed to find life, just evidence of environments that could have played host to it at some point.

Finding organic molecules would be an interesting step toward an eventual life-finding experiment. Organic compounds in this case means carbon-containing complex molecules, not something alive (or formerly alive).

These compounds rain down on all terrestrial planets and are found throughout space, and they do not necessarily indicate the presence of life.

For one small drift of sand, the SAM and CheMin (for Chemistry and Mineralogy) instruments did a whole lot of work, said Curiosity’s project scientist, John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH) in Pasadena.

“We used almost every part of our science payload examining this drift,” he said in a statement.

A couple weeks ago, Grotzinger was quoted in a story by NPR saying some freshly downloaded data from SAM would be “one for the history books.”

This statement created great speculation about what the results could be, although the agency tried to manage the expectations downwards.

Grotzinger said today he was misunderstood, and that he meant that the continuity of data from SAM, and the mission as a whole, would be historic in its breadth and depth.

“I’ve learned that you have to be careful about what you say and even more careful about how you say it,” he told reporters Monday. “We work at the speed of science. The rest of the world works at the speed of Instagram.”

NASA Messenger: Mercury Water Ice Encourages Search for Alien Life

All of the larger polar deposits are located on the floors or walls of impact craters. 

Deposits farther from the pole are seen to be concentrated on the north-facing sides of craters. Image released Nov. 28, 2012. 

CREDIT: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/ Carnegie Institution of Washington/ National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Arecibo Observatory 

The discovery of huge amounts of water ice and possible organic compounds on the heat-blasted planet Mercury suggests that the raw materials necessary for life as we know it may be common throughout the solar system, researchers say.

Mercury likely harbors between 100 billion and 1 trillion metric tons of water ice in permanently shadowed areas near its poles, scientists analyzing data from NASA's Messenger spacecraft announced Thursday (Nov. 29).

Life on sun-scorched Mercury remains an extreme longshot, the researchers stressed, but the new results should still put a spring in the step of astrobiologists around the world.

"The more we examine the solar system, the more we realize it's a soggy place," Jim Green, the director of NASA's Planetary Science Division, said during a press conference today.

"And that's really quite exciting, because that means the amount of water that we have here on Earth — that was not only inherent when it was originally formed but probably brought here — that water and other volatiles were brought to many other places in the solar system," Green added.

"So it really bodes well for us to continue on the exploration, following the water and its signs throughout the solar system." [Latest Mercury Photos from Messenger]

NASA Mars Rover Curiosity: Traces of Past Life Discovered?

As space fans anticipate news of organic molecules from the Mars Curiosity rover – cryptically teased by the mission's chief scientist, John Grotzinger, there's one man who is even more excited than most.

Former NASA researcher Gilbert Levin says that a positive sign of organics by Curiosity would confirm his claim that NASA has already seen evidence for life on Mars – from an experiment called Labeled Release that went to the Red Planet aboard the Viking mission.

If Curiosity has found evidence for organics, as many are hoping, "that removes the last barrier to my interpretation of the Labeled Release results, and leaves us free and clear", Levin reported.

Though the prospect of new Curiosity findings have set the internet abuzz, nobody from NASA has yet said publicly what they are: Grotzinger has refused to elaborate journalists, to a presentation scheduled for the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, which begins on 3 December.

Water, Footprints or Life on Mars? NASA Says; Maybe not!

NASA downplayed Wednesday talk of a major discovery by its Martian rover after remarks by the mission chief raised hopes it may have unearthed evidence life once existed on the Red Planet.

Excitement is building over soon-to-be-released results from NASA's Curiosity rover, which is three months into a two-year mission to determine if Mars has ever been capable of supporting microbial life.

Its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments have been sending back information as it hunts for compounds such as methane, as well as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, that would mean life could once have existed there.

In an interview aired Tuesday, lead mission investigator John Grotzinger hinted at something major but said there would be no announcement for several weeks.

"We're getting data from SAM," he said. "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good."

A spokesman for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the project, appeared to pour cold water Wednesday on the hopes of space enthusiasts looking forward to an earth-shattering discovery.

"John was delighted about the quality and range of information coming in from SAM during the day a reporter happened to be sitting in John's office last week. He has been similarly delighted by results at other points during the mission so far," spokesman Guy Webster reported.

"The scientists want to gain confidence in the findings before taking them outside of the science team. As for history books, the whole mission is for the history books," Webster said.

Scientists do not expect Curiosity to find aliens or living creatures but they hope to use it to analyze soil and rocks for signs the building blocks of life are present and may have supported life in the past.

The $2.5 billion Curiosity rover, which landed in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, also aims to study the Martian environment to prepare for a possible human mission there in the coming years.

US President Barack Obama has vowed to send humans to the planet by 2030.

An Artistic Concept of Alien Life - Saturn's Titan

These bizarre jellyfish-like beings were dreamt up by a British scientist as an example of life 'not as we know it'.

This is what evolution might have come up with on a world such as Saturn's moon Titan, Dr Maggie Alderin-Pocock believes.

She envisages creatures that float through clouds of methane, scooping chemical nutrients into their gaping mouths.

The aliens keep themselves aloft by means of dangling onion-like buoyancy bags, and communicate with pulses of light.

Picture: Eden's Science Month/PA

Early NASA Viking rovers found life on Mars

A new analysis by an international team of scientists revealed that soil samples collected 36 years ago contained properties which indicate extraterestial microbes were indeed present.

The samples were initally collected by NASA’s Viking rovers and put through a series of tests called the Labeled Release experiments to see if certain byproducts of life processes, such as respiration, can be detected.

The results at that time, while promising, were complicated by a number of problematic factors, mainly the possibility of contamination.

For instance, while those experiments turned up a pair of organic chlorine compounds known as chloromethane and dichloromethane, the molecules also happened to be common in earthly chemicals such as the cleaning fluid used by the Mars rovers.

And with even the mere off-chance that they were introduced into the samples by an earthly source was enough to render the results inconclusive.

But the authors of the new study, published online in the International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences, used an entirely different approach known as complexity analysis.

Instead of trying to make an assessment based solely on the presence of native compounds, they translated the data into sets of numbers to determine if whatever was present in the samples exhibited the same high degree of complexity that’s typically found with living systems on earth.

If the numerical data matched up, then, as the reasoning goes, it’s safe to conclude that there’s a very high statistical likelihood that some kind of living form was residing in that patch of dirt.

“Control responses that exhibit relatively low initial order rapidly devolve into near-random noise, while the active experiments exhibit higher initial order which decays only slowly,” the paper states. “This suggests a robust biological response.”

Although the logic makes intuitive sense, some detractors have argued that the technique still hasn’t proved to be reliable even when it comes to comparing living and non-living systems on Earth.

“Ideally, to use a technique on data from Mars, one would want to show that the technique has been well-calibrated and well-established on Earth. The need to do so is clear; on Mars we have no way to test the method, while on Earth we can,” planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., reported.

Still, Joseph Miller, a neuropharmacologist at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine and one of the authors of the study, feels pretty confident in the team’s conclusions.

He said: “On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there.”

Is life from Earth scattered all over our Milky Way?

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs would have thrown billions of tonnes of rock and water out into space. Credit: NASA

A team of scientists from Japan are suggesting that the asteroid impact that killed dinosaurs may have also spread life from Earth throughout our Milky Way.
 
65 million years ago, a 10km-wide asteroid smashed into the Earth and brought the 165 million-year reign of the dinosaurs to an end.

It also spewed billions of tonnes of (potentially) life-bearing rock out into space. The Japanese team of physicists believe they have calculated what happened to it all.

The immediate effects of a trillion-tonne rock smashing to the Earth are well documented, global wildfires, mega-tsunamis and mass extinctions, but the impact would have also thrown out billions of tonnes of water and rock that could have carried microbial life with it.

Researchers from Kyoto Sangyo University, in Japan believe they know where some of these rocks went.


They have focused their efforts on the chunks of rock that may have landed in areas of the galaxy where life could potentially prosper.

On the shortlist were moons and planets thought to possess water, such as Jupiter’s moon, Europa; Saturn’s moon, Enceladus and Earth-like exoplanets orbiting other stars.

Surprisingly, they have calculated that almost as much ejecta (rock and ice) would have landed on Enceladus as on the Moon – around a hundred million individual rocks.

But the largest proportion of these rocks are thought to have ended up interstellar space.

The team has estimated that about 1,000 pieces of “Earth rock” would have reached the red dwarf star, Gliese 581, where at least six planets have been identified as candidates for life.

Gliese 581 is located 20.3 light years from Earth, so it would have taken the rocks about a million years to make the journey.

Scientists don’t know if microbial life could survive such an extended journey through the cold vacuum of space, but the possibility that some sort of life from Earth could have made its home there is something the paper considers.

Based on this premise, the team have calculated how long it would take for ejecta from Earth to seed the entire galaxy with life.

They suggest that it would take about a trillion years (1,000 billion) to spread through a volume of space the size of our Milky Way. Well, it is only 10-13 billion years old.

ESA Mars express: The pit-chains of Mars – a place for life?

ESA Mars Express: Tractus Catena

Tractus Catena is shown here in a computer generated perspective view.

The image was created using data obtained from the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft.

The pits seen in the background show hints of layered bedrock in the upper walls of each depression.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

The latest images released from ESA’s Mars Express reveal a series of ‘pit-chains’ on the flanks of one of the largest volcanoes in the Solar System.

Depending on their origin, they might be tempting targets in the search for microbial life on the Red Planet.

The images, taken on 22 June 2011, cover Tractus Catena in the Arcadia quadrangle, part of the vast Tharsis region on Mars.

This region boasts a number of huge volcanoes, including the three collectively known as Tharsis Montes.

To their north sits Alba Mons, also known as Alba Patera, one of the largest volcanoes in the Solar System by area and volume.

Tractus Catena sits on its southeastern flank of Alba Mons and the pit-chains in that region are a series of circular depressions that formed along fracture points in the martian crust.

Pit-chains can have a volcanic origin. Lava streaming from a volcano solidifies on the surface, leaving a molten tube of lava running below.

A wider contextual image of the Tractus Catena region showing the surrounding fossae and the large shield volcano Ascraeus Mons, discovered by Mariner 9 in 1971.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Once volcanic activity ceases, the tube empties, leaving behind a subterranean cavity.

Over time, parts of the roof over the cavity may collapse, leaving circular depressions on the surface.

On Earth, recent examples can be seen on the flanks of Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, while on the Moon, Hadley Rille, visited by Apollo 15 in 1971, is believed to have formed in the same way billions of years ago.

Tractus Catena in a colour-coded plan view based on a digital terrain model of the region, from which the topography of the landscape can be derived.

Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Pit-chains can also be caused by strains in the Martian crust, which translates into a series of parallel elongated depressions known as grabens, in which pits can also form.

But the most dramatic scenario involves groundwater. On Earth, there are clear examples of similar structures in ‘Karst’ regions, labelled after the German name for a region extending from Slovenia to Italy, where this phenomenon was first studied.

Some of Earth’s most famous examples are the network of ‘cenotes’ on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.

These deep natural pits form when the surface limestone rocks collapse, exposing the groundwater underneath.

This origin is the most interesting in the context of the search for microbial life on Mars. If there are any cave-like structures associated with the pits, microorganisms could have survived, protected from the harsh surface environment.

Soviet Scientists Move on from Mars, Life on Venus likely

The Soviet Union's landing probe, Venus-13, detected the presence of several objects resembling living organisms, on the surface of the planet Venus in 1982, according to research published in the current issue of Solar System Research.

The photographs taken by the Russian probe show objects resembling a "disk", a "black flap" and a "scorpion", according to Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences who analyzed the pictures and published the findings.

All the objects appear to have changed their locations in different photographs, indicating there was a possibility they were living beings. They "emerge, fluctuate and disappear," explained Ksanfomaliti in his research.

"What if we forget about the current theories about the non-existence of life on Venus, let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," he adds.

The quest to discover life in outer space has been a never-ending one for scientists. The planet Mars is generally considered the most promising field for such endeavors.

Venus, the second planet from the sun, is equally usually least considered during such discussions, particularly since the atmosphere consists mostly of carbon dioxide and no data suggesting life ever existed has been found.

In addition, the planet's extremely hot temperatures further supports belief life could not have existed on its surface.

Artificial Lightings Seen in Kuiper Belt: Alien World?

ET watchers may be able to find an alien world through telescopes that may spot artificial lightings "out there."

A new study points to the possibility of finding extraterrestrial civilizations that may have also developed artificial lighting sources which our next generation telescopes can detect.

Researchers Abraham Loeb from Harvard and Edwin L. Turner of Princeton, said it is possible to peer into space and spot artificially illuminated objects, adding that current optical telescopes and surveys have the ability to see this amount of light at the edge of our Solar System and observations with large telescopes can measure a Kuiper Belt Objects spectra to determine if they are illuminated by artificial lighting.

Distinguishing an artificial illumination from solar illumination on KBO with typical albedo may be tricky, but the researchers said the existing telescopes and surveys can spot the difference as it will carry the dead give-away which is the spectral signature.

According to Loeb and Turner, our civilization uses two basic classes of illumination, thermal (incandescent light bulbs) and quantum (light emitting diodes and fluorescent lamps). "Such artificial light sources have different spectral properties than sunlight.

The spectra of artificial lights on distant objects would likely distinguish them from natural illumination sources, since such emission would be exceptionally rare in the natural thermodynamic conditions present on the surface of relatively cold objects.

Therefore, artificial illumination may serve as a lamppost which signals the existence of extraterrestrial technologies and thus civilizations," the researchers said.

Not all random light source detected where there should be darkness might be considered a sign of life, the study said, as there are many factors which could contribute to illumination, such as viewing angle, backscattering, surface shadowing, outgassing, rotation, surface albedo variations and more.

SETI: Astronomers Resume Search for Intelligent Alien Life

Allen Telescope Array

CREDIT: SETI.org

Astronomers have rebooted their search for intelligent life on alien planets, and they've got thousands of targets to scan.

After hibernating for more than seven months, a set of radio telescopes run by the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has once again begun listening for signals from the many alien planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope, researchers announced Monday (Dec. 5).

"This morning, at 6:18, we began re-observing the Kepler worlds," Jill Tarter, director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute, said Monday during the Kepler Science Conference here at NASA's Ames Research Center. "We're just extremely excited to be back on the air today."

SETI's Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a set of 42 radio dishes located about 300 miles (500 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. It began scanning the heavens for "technosignatures" — electromagnetic signals that could betray the presence of an intelligent alien civilization — in 2007.

SETI researchers recently started using Kepler's discoveries to guide the ATA's activities. Kepler launched in March 2009 on a mission to hunt for Earth-size planets in their parent stars' habitable zone, that just-right range of distances where liquid water — and perhaps life as we know it — could exist.

In January of this year, Tarter said, the SETI team started training the Allen array on the 54 planet candidates Kepler had detected in the habitable zone to date.

The work didn't last long, however. SETI had to shut the ATA down in April after budget problems forced the Institute's former partner, the University of California, Berkeley, to withdraw from the project.

SETI launched a crowdfunding site, www.setistars.org, in an attempt to get the array back up and running. And the public came through, donating enough money to take the ATA out of mothballs. As of Monday, citizens had chipped in more than $230,000.

Some funding help has also come from the United States Air Force, which is interested in using the array to track satellites and space debris, SETI officials said.

Many new worlds to scan
On Monday, the Kepler team announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, bringing to 2,326 the total number of potential alien worlds the instrument has detected in its first 16 months of operation.

Researchers have confirmed only about 30 of these candidate planets to date, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of them will end up being the real deal.

The ATA will take special interest in Kepler's candidates in the habitable zone, Tarter said. But SETI researchers hope to scan every last one of the potential planets to minimize the chances that we're blinded by our assumptions about where life "should" be.

"What we think we know actually might be a barrier to finding what is actually out there," Tarter said. "We intend to systematically explore all of these candidates."

The search of the Kepler candidates will involve scanning 9 billion different channels in a broad window of microwave frequencies. It should take two to three years, at $1.2 million per year, to search for signals from every potential alien world from the study, Tarter said.

It's exciting to focus the ATA on likely alien solar systems rather than just point the dishes toward stars and hope for the best, she added.

"We now know where to look for planets," Tarter said. "We're going to take the public's quest for technosignatures to the next level."

Veteran Mars Researcher Says Viking Detected Life on Mars

NASA has repeatedly stated that its new mission to Mars, Curiosity, carries no life detector.

Yet, Gilbert V. Levin, Experimenter on NASA's 1976 Viking Mission, disagrees.

He says instruments aboard Curiosity can confirm his published claim that his Labeled Release (LR) experiment detected living microorganisms on Mars.

Dr. Levin was Experimenter and Dr. Patricia Ann Straat Co-Experimenter on the experiment that produced evidence of life on Mars.

Because another Viking instrument failed to find organic matter, the stuff of life, NASA discounted the LR results. Since Viking, Mars missions have sought only evidence of habitability, not life itself.

Levin now claims the organic analyzers and the high-resolution camera on Curiosity as his "stealth life detectors."

After twenty years of analyzing the LR data, reviewing flaws in Viking's organic detector, and studying new information on life obtained from Mars and Earth, Levin finally announced his "life claim" in a 1997 publication.

today, he said that, should Curiosity detect organic matter, the last obstacle to his claim to life on Mars will vanish. Co-Experimenter Straat agrees with Levin, saying, "I look forward to Curiosity data that may confirm our life interpretation of the LR."

Levin's other "virtual experiment" is Curiosity's high-resolution camera. It might determine whether "lichen-like" colored patches Levin found on rocks at the Viking sites might be living organisms.

Patricia Straat, and JPL's William Benton assisted him in the study which subjected images of the Mars rocks and terrestrial rocks bearing lichen to the Viking Imaging System.

Visible and infrared spectral analyses found the same responses from the Mars and terrestrial images (Levin, G. V., P. A. Straat and W. D. Benton, "Color and Feature Changes at Mars Viking Lander Site," J. Theoret. Biol., 75, 381-390, 1978 - available at gillevin.com, tab "Mars Research").

Levin has now written Dr. Mike Malin, designer of Curiosity's camera, asking him to seek and take high-resolution pictures of any such patches, hoping to determine whether Viking found living organisms on the rocks.

Levin (see biog. gillevin.com) started his Mars life-seeking efforts in 1958. Funded by NASA, he began developing the LR. In 1969, NASA appointed Levin as Team Member of the IRIS experiment aboard the 1971 Mariner 9 Mars orbiter. Dr. Straat joined that effort in 1970. They sought organic gases in the Martian atmosphere.

None were found, but recent observers of Mars have claimed detecting methane, possibly of microbial origin. Following Viking, Levin was appointed Team Member of NASA's MOx experiment aboard the Russian '96 Mission to Mars, converting that soil analysis instrument to give it life detection capability. However, the spacecraft crashed after launch.

"This is a very exciting time," says Levin, now an adjunct professor at Arizona State University, Tempe, "something for which I have been waiting for years. At the very least, the Curiosity results may bring about my long-requested re-evaluation of the Viking LR results."

SETI: Rethinking the Search for Alien 'Footprints'

Any intelligent extraterrestrial life that exists probably won't announce itself by blowing up the White House, or win over the hearts of children as a lovable alien with a glowing finger.

Many scientists simply hope to find evidence of them by scanning the skies for a radio signal from a distant star's alien civilization but such efforts may also risk overlooking clues of past alien activity right here on Earth.

If aliens did leave their mark on Earth by some wild chance, we could search for the possible "footprints" of alien technology or even analyze the DNA of terrestrial organisms for signs of intelligent messages or tinkering.

Such a CSI-style forensics search could complement, rather than replace, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) astronomers who continue to look skyward, said Paul Davies, a physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.

"My proposals aim to spread the burden from a small band of heroic radio astronomers to the entire scientific community," Davies said. "Projects like genomic SETI are an attempt to complement radio SETI, not undermine it."

Scottish Scientists step towards bringing life to inorganic matter

All life on Earth is carbon-based, which has led to the widespread assumption that any other life that may exist in the universe would also be carbon-based.

Excluding the possibility of elements other than carbon forming the basis of life is often referred to as carbon chauvinism.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow are looking to overcome this bias and provide new insights into evolution by attempting to create “life” from carbon-free, inorganic chemicals.

They’ve now taken the first tentative steps towards this goal with the creation of inorganic-chemical-cells, or iCHELLS.

Prof Cronin says the current theory of evolution is really a special theory of evolution because it only applies only to organic biology. He says that if he and his team are successful in creating life from inorganic matter, it could lead to a general theory of evolution.

"The grand aim is to construct complex chemical cells with life-like properties that could help us understand how life emerged and also to use this approach to define a new technology based upon evolution in the material world - a kind of inorganic living technology," said Prof Cronin.

"If successful this would give us some incredible insights into evolution and show that it's not just a biological process.

It would also mean that we would have proven that non carbon-based life could exist and totally redefine our ideas of design."



Prof Cronin gave a talk at TED Global earlier this year in Edinburgh where he said that if his team is successful in creating life while taking carbon out of the equation, it might reveal what other elements might be capable of producing life elsewhere in the universe and provide NASA with a better idea of what to look for in the search for extraterrestrial life.

The University of Glasgow team's paper "Modular Redox-Active Inorganic Chemical Cells: iCHELLs' is published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

NASA Detects Metabolic Precursors in Meteorite Dust

Dr. Cooper analyzes meteoritic material by injecting samples into gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer. 

This instrument separates very complicated molecular mixtures into individual compounds that are more easily identified.

Image credit: NASA

NASA scientists have found organic compounds associated with cellular respiration in carbonaceous meteorites, and simulated space-like conditions in the laboratory to determine how the compounds could have formed in deep space billions of years ago.

The compounds belong to newly discovered classes of compounds in meteorites, specifically keto acids, hydroxy tricarboxylic acids and tricarboxylic acids, some of which are members of the citric acid cycle.

This cycle is part of a process in which living cells break down organic fuel molecules in the presence of oxygen to harvest the energy they need to grow and divide.

This metabolic process occurs in most plants, animals, fungi, and many bacteria. The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence that a variety of organic compounds delivered to Earth by carbonaceous meteorites may have played a role in the origin and/or evolution of biochemical pathways.

Previously, most members of the citric acid cycle had not been identified in extraterrestrial sources.

"Some apparently ancient and critical metabolic pathways require a suite of compounds, of which a few are very fragile.

For such compounds to have survived this long in meteorites, they would have required either a continuous energetic production, or simply very low temperatures to preserve them," said George Cooper, research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

The findings were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although many water-soluble organic compounds have been detected in carbonaceous meteorites, they never included keto acids and compounds similar to citric acid – some of which are critically important to biological processes, such as glycolysis and the citric acid cycle. These processes are considered among the earliest in the evolution of life.

"Once we identified such fragile members, like the keto acids, we started to create scenarios for how they could have formed billions of years ago, and we then tested our assumptions in the laboratory," said Cooper.

As part of the research, scientists used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to analyse extracts of multiple carbonaceous meteorites, including Murchison, Murray and Allan Hills.

"We won’t know how significant our findings really are in terms of understanding pre-biological processes on early Earth, until we see more evidence from other disciplines, like astronomy, and geology. This might take a while," said Cooper.

The research was funded by NASA's Astrobiology Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program in Washington, D.C.

Additional information and images are available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/dna-meteorites.html

NASA finds more evidence of life carried by Comets!

Those seeking to bridge the divide between science and religion might want to throw a playful wrench into the idea of intelligent design as it appears the great Deity was hurling iceballs through the universe to see what stuck.

NASA scientists have recently discovered “organic compounds associated with cellular respiration” in meteorites, adding fuel to the theory that life on our planet was delivered from the heavens.

Fragile organic compounds associated with the citric acid cycle that allows cells to harvest the energy they need to grow required certain conditions to make the trip to Earth successfully, so scientists are recreating conditions in the lab to test how this could have occurred.

Although many water-soluble organic compounds have been detected in carbonaceous meteorites, they never included keto acids and compounds similar to citric acid – some of which are critically important to biological processes, such as glycolysis and the citric acid cycle.

These processes are considered among the earliest in the evolution of life.

Not exactly what folks had in mind with the whole man-made-in-the-image-of-God thing, but it might make those kids terrorizing the neighbourhood this winter with handmade missiles of frozen destruction a bit more tolerable to think of their inspiration as divine.