Experts want to find Earthish planets w/ life

[shann0]

www.spacedaily.com/reports/Penn_State_expert_determined_to_find_life_on_Earth_like_planets_999.html

Thanks to popular Hollywood films like "E.T.," "Avatar" and "Super 8," life on other planets seems highly conceivable to people who have considered the idea that we are not alone in the universe. Jim Kasting, distinguished professor of geosciences in Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and an expert in atmospheric evolution, is one person who considers it a lot.

As a kid growing up near the space program in Huntsville, Ala., reading as much science fiction as he could get his hands on, Kasting had space exploration on his mind all the time. It influenced who he is today as well as the research he's most interested in conducting. By studying early Earth's atmosphere and the origins of oxygen in it, Kasting has become one of the foremost experts on planetary habitable zones.

In his book, "How to Find a Habitable Planet," Kasting explains how his research with NASA may be able to detect worlds outside of our solar system that are suitable for sustaining life.

As a doctoral student studying atmospheric science in the late 1970s, Kasting read several papers written by American astrophysicist Michael Hart concerning atmospheric evolution. His work piqued Kasting's interest toward proving that, despite Hart's beliefs, there are habitable planets in the universe besides Earth. After completing his doctoral degree at the University of Michigan, Kasting served as a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center before joining Penn State.

After conducting extensive research on the subject, he feels confident saying there are other planets in the universe able to host living organisms - and he hopes to live to see the day when this is a proven fact.

"I'm very much an optimist," Kasting said.

"I think there is somewhere else that has a rocky surface with an atmosphere similar to ours and with liquid water on the surface. There are almost certainly other Earth-like planets on which life may arise."

In early 2010, NASA announced that the Kepler spacecraft, designed to discover Earth-like planets within the Milky Way galaxy, found several rocky planets within their star's habitable zone. All of these planets are too far away - hundreds to thousands of light years - to determine whether they are actually habitable.

So, how do Kasting and other researchers hope to prove that planets around other stars are capable of hosting life? There are several ways, according to Kasting. The first task is to identify rocky planets within the habitable zones of nearby stars. One option called the Space Interferometry Mission, or SIM Lite, could have done this.

SIM Lite was a space telescope designed to hunt for Earth-sized planets, but NASA canceled the project in late 2010 after more than $500 million of work because the 2010 Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey didn't consider it a high priority. Kasting said the telescope would have been able to measure side-to-side wiggle in a planet's parent star, like our Sun, to determine the motion of a planet orbiting it.

Another option, but one that Kasting said is even more ambitious and expensive, is the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF). Several "flavors" of this telescope use different techniques to look for planets. One uses an internal coronagraph to block the light of a solar system's parent star, to see smaller, dimmer planets.

Alternatively, one could fly an occulting disk, or "starshade," in front of the telescope to block the star's light while retaining light from its planets. Another technique uses an infrared astronomical interferometer to measure the heat energy emitted from the planets in a solar system, while blocking out the star's heat energy.

Right now, NASA has canceled the TPF mission indefinitely. However, the 2010 Decadal Survey recommended this mission for further study, so it may reappear in the future. Furthermore, since Japan and some of Europe are interested in similar technology and research, Kasting hopes the U.S. can collaborate with both to conduct international space missions.

"What hurt our funding is the previous administration's interest in putting men back on the moon and trying to send them to Mars," Kasting said. "Also, right now a lot of astronomers are more interested in researching the Big Bang and dark energy as well as gravitational waves. We need to convince more of them to be interested in planets and the search for extraterrestrial life."

Since astronomers' interests are varied, it's hard to secure the several billion dollars needed to build one of these big space telescopes. Kasting hopes to collaborate with other countries to acquire the funding needed to launch any of the telescopes.

He also hopes other researchers can share the same equipment to conduct their own studies, saving money and ensuring many different astronomical investigations can be pursued using these instruments. If any of these efforts succeed, Kasting may finally help humankind learn whether extraterrestrial life exists.

[PrisonerOfHope]

Well, now they're claiming there are worms on Mars:

Discovery of Deepest Worms Holds Promise for Mars Life
Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 03 June 2011 Time: 03:57 PM ET
Live-science



The nematode H. mephisto lives nearly a mile (1.3 km) underground in rock fractures near South African goldmines.
The nematode H. mephisto lives nearly a mile (1.3 km) underground in rock fractures near South African goldmines.

CREDIT: Property of the University Ghent, Belgium - Gaetan Borgonie


How low can worms go? According to a new study, at least 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers) below the Earth's surface.

That's the depth at which scientists discovered a new species of worm, dubbed Halicephalobus mephisto in honor of Faust's demon Mephistopheles. The worm, reported this week in the journal Nature, is the deepest living multicellular organism ever found and opens up the possibility that multicellular life could lurk below the surface of a planet such as Mars.

"We tried to get the title of the paper to be 'Worms from Hell,'" said study author Tullis Onstott of Princeton University. "But Nature didn't go for that."


The Moby Dick worm

Onstott and his colleagues have been searching for subsurface life for 15 years, focusing on the ultra-deep mines of South Africa, which penetrate more than 1.8 miles (3 km) into the Earth. They and other teams of scientists have found that life has very deep roots, with single-celled organisms found miles underground. Some of these organisms are quite extreme: One 2008 study found life thriving a mile under the seafloor, surviving in temperatures between 140 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit (60 and 110 degrees Celsius). [Read Extremophiles: World's Weirdest Life]

But finding the multicellular, 0.02-inch-long (0.5 millimeters) H. mephisto is a different story. The worm, or nematode, lives in fluid-filled rock fractures, where it grazes on bacteria, Onstott told LiveScience.

"It's kind of like finding Moby Dick in Lake Ontario," he said. "It's so volumetrically big. It's 10 billion times the size of the bacteria upon which it feeds."

To find the worm, Onstott and his team sampled water from mine boreholes as deep as 2.2 miles (3.6 km). They also sampled soil around the mine boreholes and filtered about 40,000 gallons of surface water to ensure that the nematodes weren't coming into the mine from above.

In the Beatrix gold mine, they found their quarry: the tiny, simple nematode, alive and capable of asexual reproduction. The researchers were able to get H. mephisto to reproduce, and the species is still "squirming around in the lab," Onstott said. [See a picture of the nematode]

The researchers found no evidence of the nematode in surface waters or soils, indicating that it is native to deep rock fractures. Chemical analysis revealed that the water in which H. mephisto lives dates back at least 2,900 years, meaning it's been down there for a while, said Rick Colwell, a microbiologist who studies subsurface organisms at Oregon State University.

"They have been quite careful in measuring the environment that these organisms come from," Colwell, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience.

In lab experiments, the research team found that H. mephisto prefers to snack on the bacteria found in deep rock fractures, turning up its wormy nose at aboveground buffet options such as E. coli.

Worms in space?

The find could encourage researchers to expand the search for life under our own feet, said Colwell, who along with others is working on a project called the Census of Deep Life, dedicated to cataloguing what lies beneath Earth's surface.

"As we initiate this census of deep life," Colwell said, "I can see expanding it in the direction of some more complex life forms, like these nematodes."

Farther from home, the discovery of very deep multicellular worms opens up possibilities in the search for extraterrestrial life, said Michael Meyer, the lead scientist for Mars exploration at NASA, who was not involved in the study. Researchers have assumed that any subsurface life on a planet like Mars would be unicellular, Meyer told LiveScience.

"This kinds of opens it up to, well, even multicellular life could be possible," Meyer said.

www.space.com/11873-discovery-deepest-worms-holds-promise-mars-life.html

Personally, I think they should try and find some intelligent life on Earth!

[shann0]

Those silly scientists crack me up. They find something here on earth, and try to make us believe it means there's life on Mars.