Seldom does one rock outcrop get so many visitors in a day, especially when that outcrop is located in rugged, frigid terrain abutting the Greenland Ice Sheet and can be reached only by helicopter. But this has been a specimen of great importance and notoriety since it appeared from beneath the snow pack some eight …
Continue reading "On The Frontier Of The Hunt For Signs Of Life On Early Earth And Ancient Mars"
Paleontology has for centuries worked to understand the distant past by digging up fossilized remains and analyzing how and why they fit into the evolutionary picture. The results have been impressive. But they have been limited. The evolutionary picture painted relies largely on the discovery of once hard-bodied organisms, with a smattering of iconic finds …
Continue reading "Exploring Early Earth by Using DNA As A Fossil"
It is my very good fortune to report that I have just arrived in Greenland for quite a scientific adventure. Over the next days, a group of scientists (along with me and NASA videographer Mike Toillion) will be traveling to the site of the stromatolite that might, or might not, be the oldest remains …
Biosignatures -- evidence that says or suggests that life has once been present -- are often very hard to find and interpret. Scientists examining fossilized life on Earth can generally reach some sort of agreement about what is before them, but what about the soft-bodied or even single-celled organisms that were the sum total of …
Continue reading "“Agnostic Biosignatures,” And The Path To Life As We Don’t Know It"
The newest space telescope in the sky -- NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, TESS -- has been searching for exoplanets for less than a year, but already it has quite a collection to its name. The TESS mission is to find relatively nearby planets orbiting bright and stable suns, and so expectations were high from …
Continue reading "Exoplanets Discoveries Flood in From TESS"
Did you know that many bacteria -- some of the oldest lifeforms on Earth -- can talk? Really. And not only between the same kind of single-cell bacteria, but back and forth with members of other species, too. Okay, they don't talk in words or with sounds at all. But they definitely communicate in …
This is Apollo memory month, when the 50th anniversary arrives of the first landing of astronauts on the moon. It was a very big deal and certainly deserves attention and applause. But there's something unsettling about the anniversary as well, a sense that the human exploration side of NASA's mission has disappointed and that its …
Continue reading "Curiosity Rover as Seen From High Above by Mars Orbiter"
A vehicle that flies like a drone and will try to unravel some of the mysteries of Saturn's moon Titan was selected yesterday to be the next New Frontiers mission to explore the solar system. Searching for the building blocks of life, the Dragonfly mission will be able to fly multiple sorties to sample …
Continue reading "NASA Announces Astrobiology Mission to Titan"
The presence -- and absence -- of methane gas on Mars has been both very intriguing and very confusing for years. And news coming out last week and then on Monday adds to this scientific mystery. To the great surprise of the Curiosity rover team, their Sample Analysis on Mars instrument sent back a measurement …
Continue reading "Methane on Mars. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow"
The quest to find habitable -- and perhaps inhabited -- planets and moons beyond Earth focuses largely on their location in a solar system and the nature of its host star, the eccentricity of its orbit, its size and rockiness, and the chemical composition of its atmosphere, assuming that it has one. Astronomy, astrophysics, cosmochemistry …
Continue reading "The Interiors of Exoplanets May Well Hold the Key to Their Habitability"
Many Worlds 