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Astrobiology

How to Plant a Garden on Mars — With a Robot

May 14, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Louisa Preston, an Astrobiologist and Planetary Geologist. She is a TED Fellow, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Open University, UK. In the last century humanity has taken gigantic leaps forward in the [...]

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‘Ultimate’ Prebiotic Molecules Found in Interstellar Space

February 28, 2013

The building blocks of life could have their beginnings in the tiny icy grains that make up the gas and dust found between the stars, and those icy grains could be the key to understanding how life can arise on planets. With help from students, researchers have discovered an important pair of prebiotic molecules in [...]

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Hunting for High Life: What Lives in Earth’s Stratosphere?

November 15, 2012

The Moon photographed through the layers of the atmosphere from the ISS in December 2003 (NASA/JSC) What lives at the edge of space? Other than high-flying jet aircraft pilots (and the occasional daredevil skydiver) you wouldn’t expect to find many living things over 10 kilometers up — yet this is exactly where one NASA researcher [...]

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Mars Sample Return Mission? Naaah… Just Beam Back Martian DNA

October 19, 2012

Artist concept of a Mars Sample Return mission. Credit: Wickman Spacecraft & Propulsion. A Mars sample return mission has long been a dream and goal of many planetary scientists. Getting Martian soil samples back here on Earth would allow them to be studied in ways rovers and landers just can’t do. Of course, the big [...]

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Alien Life May Not Be So Alien – If It Exists At All

May 9, 2012

Are we too hopeful in our hunt for extraterrestrial life? Regardless of exoplanet counts, super-Earths and Goldilocks zones, the probability of life elsewhere in the Universe is still a moot point — to date, we still only know of one instance of it. But even if life does exist somehow, somewhere besides Earth, would it [...]

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