End to end, the world measures 19 miles 31 kilometers in length. The team says that the two spheres likely joined as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in a fender-bender. We are seeing a physical representation of the beginning of planetary formation, frozen in time," said Jeff Moore, New Horizons Geology and Geophysics team lead.
Marc Kaufman is an experienced journalist, having spent three decades at the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer , and is the author of two books on searching for life and planetary habitability. He also writes the Many Worlds blog. Life, Here and Beyond Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. Written by Marc Kaufman. Turning Science Fiction into Science Fact Consider: The rover Curiosity has firmly determined that ancient Mars was significantly more wet and warm, and was an entirely habitable place for microbial life.
Sounds of Space Cassini's magnetometer detection of an atmosphere on Enceladus. This is an artistic rendering of planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way the planets, their orbits and their host stars are all vastly magnified compared to their real separations. The Atacama desert is one of the driest places on Earth, making it a good Mars analogy. The World of Astrobiology While the United States and NASA have pioneered many lines of astrobiological study, we are hardly alone — as is only proper for an effort to address such enormous and universal questions.
The photo was actually composed of dozens of individual images taken between April and May Credit: NASA. Looking for Life At the heart of astrobiology is yet another basic and unanswered question: What actually is life? Sounds of Space Saturn radio emissions. The search for life beyond Earth is so intertwined with other NASA goals and is so interdisciplinary by nature and design , it can never really be separated or isolated from them.
The Cassini mission to Saturn discovered plumes spitting out of the moon Enceladus, and the Hubble Space Telescope did the same for Europa. Both plumes tell of an inner water world, and so are important to planetary science as well as astrobiology. Most of our planet is covered in water. Earth's atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen and 1 percent other ingredients—the perfect balance to breathe and live. Many orbiting spacecraft study the Earth from above as a whole system—observing the atmosphere, ocean, glaciers, and the solid earth.
Our atmosphere protects us from incoming meteoroids, most of which break up in our atmosphere before they can strike the surface. Storytellers explore the nature of our planet and possible alternate realities in many books, movies, and television shows. The iconic film "Planet of the Apes" and its sequels takes place in a future in which astronauts "discover" a planet inhabited by highly intelligent apes and primitive humans, only to realize later, much to their dismay, that — spoiler alert!
In the long-running and re-booted television series "Battlestar Galactica" — tired survivors of a war with highly evolved robots called Cylons are on a quest to find Earth, a long-lost colony. In other stories, Earth has been abandoned or destroyed, such as in the Joss Whedon series "Firefly," or the book and its film adaptation "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Our home planet Earth is a rocky, terrestrial planet. It has a solid and active surface with mountains, valleys, canyons, plains and so much more.
Earth is special because it is an ocean planet. But unless we get lucky, the search for signs of life could take decades. Discovering another blue-white marble hidden in the star field, like a sand grain on the beach, will probably require an even larger imaging telescope.
Designs are already underway for that next-generation planet finder, to be sent aloft in the s or s. MIT physics professor Sara Seager looks for possible chemical combinations that could signal the presence of alien life. She and her biochemistry colleagues first focused on the six main elements associated with life on Earth: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, sulfur and hydrogen. To find out how about the advanced, space-based telescope technology being developed at NASA to search for life among the stars, read Inventing the Future.
Are we really alone? Life in the Universe: What are the Odds?
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