PIXL: A New NASA Instrument For Ferreting Out Clues of Ancient Life on Mars

  The search for life, or signs of past life beyond Earth is now a central issue in space science, is central to the mission of NASA, and is actually a potentially breakthrough discovery in the making  for humanity.    The scientific stakes could hardly be higher. But identifying evidence of ancient microbial life – and …

Time-Traveling in the Australian Outback in Search of Early Earth

This story was written by Nicholas Siegler, Chief Technologist for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the help of doctoral student Markus Gogouvitis, at the University of New South Wales, Australia and Georg-August-University in Gottingen, Germany.     This past July I joined a group of geologists, geochemists, microbiologists, and fellow …