02 January 2021
Life beneath glaciers is good news in the search for life on icy worlds
... the ways water and microbes interact with the bedrock beneath glaciers have found thriving colonies of microbial life that are using hydrogen to survive instead of oxygen; a process that could be replicated in seemingly inhospitable environments...
30 July 2020
NASA's Perseverance rover successfully blasts off to Mars
... wetter conditions could, if they endured long enough, have provided a suitable environment to support the development of microbial life. Finding signs that ancient organisms once thrived on the planet is one of the major goals of NASA’s Mars...
21 November 2018
Jezero Crater chosen as landing site for Mars 2020 mission
... only seek signs of ancient habitable conditions – and past microbial life -- but the rover also will collect rock and soil samples... ancient organic molecules and other potential signs of microbial life from the water and sediments that flowed into ...
29 July 2020
Mars 2020 mission, Perseverance rover 'go for launch,' says NASA
... Mars rover Perseverance the all clear to launch later this week on a mission to seek out signs of ancient microbial life. "The launch readiness review is complete, and we are indeed go for launch," administrator Jim Bridenstine said. "We are...
November 2020
The alien hunter’s field manual
...the Proxima Centauri star system. The first class of biosignature only tells us that microbial life is present, but nothing else about it. Generically, life will produce unstable molecules faster than they can disintegrate, as it rearranges molecular...
April 2024
Terraformal dreaming
...we weren’t interfering with the native biotic processes of Mars? For Zubrin and Musk, it doesn’t matter. Whatever microbial life might exist in a frozen rock on the Red Planet, it’s nothing compared to the complexity of terrestrial vegetation, animal...
