Search For Life in the Right Places

Curious about just how astrobiologists plan to make good on their goal to find life in space in the next 20 years? 

The first will take place later this year, when Russian scientists will tap Earth’s final frontier, the subglacial Antarctic lakes. Any life they find under 2.5 miles of ice in the ancient isolated waters of Lake Vostok won’t technically be extraterrestrial, of course, but it could be new and bizarre – and akin to what’s possibly living in the suspected subsurface oceans on Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter. 

Martians could also be on the horizon. With all the attention the Red Planet gets, it should come as no surprise that NASA’s next big flagship mission is headed there. Later this decade the agency will begin a long-term project to bring Mars rocks back to Earth. Many think the Mars Sample Return mission could be the one that finally finds ET (even if it is a long-dead microbe, not a little green man).

If we don’t find aliens in our own backyard, they could be lurking in other solar systems. As soon as next decade, a Terrestrial Planet Finder mission -- something like the New World’s Observer telescope and starshade in our gallery -- will look for signs of life in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets around other stars.

Here on the ground, the Allen Telescope Array, the first instrument completely devoted to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), could analyze enough star systems to come across alien radio transmissions in the next two decades – if the SETI Institute’s new crowd-sourced funding campaign pulls through. Read more about how and when we’ll find life (and what it could look like) in our online-only interview with Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Institute. 

And, just for fun, we’ve also included a round-up of some of our favorite close encounters with “aliens,” including a 1966 UFO chase in Ohio and (possible) microbes on a meteorite announced earlier this year. Happy hunting!

Drilling For Extreme Life

For the past 20 million years, Lake Vostok has been sealed beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. This winter, after nearly 22 years of work, Russian researchers will use mechanical and thermal drills to punch through the final 100 feet before liquid water. Microbes found in Vostok could inform the search for life on the Jovian ice moon Europa, for which a mission could launch in the next decade, and other moons in our solar system thought to contain bodies of liquid water, such as Enceladus and Ganymede.

 

Drilling For Extreme Life: How It Works

THE SITE

Vostok Station once recorded the lowest temperature on Earth: –128ºF. Fortunately for researchers, average temperatures in the austral summer hover around –33º.The Russian team will commence drilling in December. Once scientists reach liquid water, they will allow water to rise up the borehole and freeze over the winter. They will return to Vostok Station in December 2012 to test the core for life.

THE DRILL

A thermal drill tethered to a power cable from the surface will penetrate the final 30 feet of ice. When the drill approaches the water surface, pressure and water sensors will trigger an expandable borehole packer to seal off the channel, preventing drilling fluid from contaminating the lake and allowing scientists to control how quickly the water will rise.

THE LAKE

Lake Vostok, one of the world’s largest lakes by volume, contains more than 1,000 cubic miles of water. At its farthest depths, some 14,000 feet below the surface, pressure reaches up to 438 atmospheres. If drilled improperly, the pressurized water could race up the borehole, causing an explosion powerful enough to destroy Vostok Station.

  

Bringing Mars Home

To determine whether life lives or has lived on Mars, scientists will most likely need to bring a sample of the planet back to Earth. The threestage NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return mission, scheduled to run from 2018 to 2027, will involve rovers, a launcher, and an orbiter equipped with an Earth Entry Vehicle (EEV) that will carry the rocks to Earth for testing. 

PHASE ONE, 2019-2021: COLLECT AND CACHE

Following launch in 2018, a rover will arrive on Mars in January 2019 and will spend nearly two years collecting rocks with a rotary coring drill. After placing as many as 40 cores in a three-inch-wide cylindrical cache, the mobile ’bot will return to its landing site and place the container on the ground.

PHASE TWO, 2025-2026: FETCH AND LAUNCH

A lander carrying the fetch rover and Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) will touch down on Mars in September 2025. Over the next three months, the rover will retrieve the cache—up to a nine-mile round-trip journey—and package the rocks in an 11-pound Orbiting Sample (OS) sphere stored inside the MAV. By the following May, the MAV rocket will launch and release the OS into orbit.

PHASE THREE, 2026-2027: RENDEZVOUS AND RETURN

An orbiter will arrive at Mars in the summer of 2023. The craft will use optical and radio-frequency tracking systems to monitor the OS launch and will rendezvous with the samples in around May 2026. The orbiter will capture the OS in a basket and transfer it to the onboard eeV—a three-foot-wide, impact-resistant, heat-shielded craft—before setting out for Earth. On descent to Earth in late 2027, the EEV will decouple from the orbiter and crash-land on the planet. The quarantined samples would then be safely recovered.

 Spotting Distant Life

To view life on other worlds, scientists will need to use a space-based telescope to scan for biosignatures in an exoplanet’s atmosphere while blocking out starlight that could skew results. The New Worlds Observer, a design developed at the University of Colorado, pairs an ultraviolet-optical-infrared telescope with an external starshade.

THE STARSHADE

The 160-foot-wide starshade moves independently to position itself between the telescope and the star. Its 16 “petals” diffract light away from the center of the shadow it casts onto the observatory. 

THE TELESCOPE

The observatory’s 13-foot aperture will collect enough ultraviolet and infrared light reflecting off the planet to distinguish it from interplanetary dust. Future telescope designs will also probably incorporate an internal coronagraph, a device on the instrument that will blot out starlight that slips past the shade.

 Searching For New Earths

In 1995 a Swiss team scanning the Milky Way discovered 51 Pegasi b, the first known exoplanet orbiting a sunlike star. Since then, scientists using ground-based and space telescopes have found more than 500 exoplanets in the galaxy. Currently only one, Gliese 581 d is considered a potential Earth analogue—it may even have oceans—but the number will grow. Kepler, a photometric telescope that points toward the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, could find as many as 3,000 new worlds by the end of the decade.

 Do Good, Find Aliens

In April, after the National Science Foundation and the state of California cut funding for radio astronomy, the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) at Hat Creek Radio Observatory, the SETI Institute’s primary listening post, went dark for the first time in nearly four years. The ATA scans deep space for alien radio signals, which some scientists say could be our best chance of finding intelligent life.

To replace the estimated $5 million it will cost to get the ATA back online full time for two years, SETI introduced a new program called SETIStars in June. For $15, donors can sponsor three-minute blocks of telescope data. In March, SETI launched the beta version of another program, a citizen-science application called setiQuest Explorer. Amateur alien hunters will be able to analyze radio-telescope data for signs of contact on their computers, tablet or mobile phone. The institute’s public outreach is paying off. By August, SETIStars had generated more than $200,000, enough to turn the ATA back on, at least for a little while.

by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: alien life,europa,extraterrestrials,jupiter,mars,orbiter,Search For Life in the Right Places,SETI Institute

Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations

Good things come to those who wait, and wait, ... and wait. This may someday be the opening sentence at a press conference at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California to announce mankind's first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth. 

           We've listened for transmissions from alien civilizations for 50 years without any luck. And there isn't the slightest clue when real data -– if ever -– may come. This bores some scientists who scornfully look at SETI as lost purely in "hypothetical-space."

           Detractors say (1) nobody's out there, (2) we're listening on the wrong medium, (3) it's a scientifically meaningless experiment unsupported by any tangible hypothesis because of all the unknowns (as listed in the famous Drake equation). It's borderline pure faith.

           However, there's no need for impatience with a null result. We've just ended a year of celebration honoring the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope for astronomical research. Galileo provided the first observational evidence in support of the Copernican Principle -– that we do not occupy a special place in the universe.

           Following Galileo, it took no less than a century to make each step outwards into the cosmos.

The earliest telescopic observations from the 1600s through the 1700s focused largely on the solar system. In the 1800's astronomers characterized stars with the powerful new tool of spectroscopy. True, telescopes of that time resolved spiral nebulae (external galaxies) but they were widely considered simply accretion disks around stars. 

External galaxies were not recognized until a little less than a century ago, once their enormous distances could be measured. This month's Hubble Space Telescope portrait of a field of galaxies stretching almost all the way back to the beginning of time was the crowning achievement of "core-sampling" the universe. 

              The 21^st century will carry us to the realization of a "second Genesis," the discovery of life arising elsewhere in space. But intelligent life too?

              In an article in the Washington Post last week Marc Kaufman reported that, with the influence of former NASA Associate Administrator Alan Stern (also the principal investigator on the New Horizons 2015 Pluto flyby), NASA is reconsidering funding SETI proposals and Congress isn't saying "no." The National Science Foundation has been funding SETI research since 2004. 

  

              It was a dark day for SETI in 1993 when Congress cut off a very modest funding for radio searches ($12 million/yr.) thereby extending isolationism across interstellar space. They disconnected the phone on a targeted search of 1,000 nearest sun-like stars and a multi-million radio frequency all-sky survey.

             Leading the attack was former Nevada Democratic Senator Richard Bryan who found a great taxpayer whipping boy in the SETI goals. He milked the patently un-scientific UFO phenomenon to belittle SETI as having any intellectual ballast. "The Great Martian Chase may finally come to an end. As of today, millions have been spent and we have yet to bag a single little green fellow," he said in 1993. Other senators questioned the use of taxpayer dollars and cited the skepticism that confronts SETI research.

             Since then SETI astronomers have scrambled to raise money through private donations. The powerful new $25 million Allen Array (pictured top), an orchard of interlinked and mass-produced radio telescopes in northern California, was funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Now I guess that means that if we get a SETI signal the first to know may be Microsoft founder Bill Gates instead of President Obama.

             Greek philosophers spoke eloquently of an infinite universe full of life, but only until recently scientists have treated the question with deep skepticism. A half century ago life was considered so fragile that the circumstances that brought it on Earth were considered at best quite rare. Today we know that life is tenacious, opportunistic, and will eat almost anything in carving out an environmental niche. Evolution is the most awesome manifestation of matter. 

             What's more, NASA's Kepler mission will likely tell us there are millions of inhabitable planets like Earth across the galaxy.

Still, intelligent life may indeed be exceedingly rare. But, armed with powerful new telescopes and technology, if anybody is out there, we should find them in the next 25 years predicts the founder of SETI, Frank Drake. Drake had the scientific courage to listen for aliens 50 years ago when the idea was definitely un-cool in science circles.

             My guess is that if intelligent life is common, then its detection -- probably purely by accident -- will happen before scientists celebrate Galileo’s 500^th anniversary. The Copernican revolution will be truly completed.

by "environment clean generations"

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Posted in: civilizations,galaxies,SETI Institute

If We Responde To An Interstellar RSVP?

Imagine surfing to your favourite science news website tomorrow to see headlines announcing the detection of a radio signal coming at us from an extraterrestrial civilization. Impossible? Not really. Yes, it’s true that over the past 50 years approximately 100 SETI programs have come up empty handed. But veteran SETI scientist Jill Tarter has pointed out that in terms of the volume of the Milky Way, we have only surveyed the equivalent volume of a Starbucks cup of coffee as compared to the volume of Earth’s oceans. The galaxy in a big place. Or, as 19th century Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle put it, potentially a "sad spectacle, . . . for misery and folly."

             Assuming there are other technological civilizations in our galaxy, and that some subset of them attempt interstellar communication via radio beacons, then detecting a signal is only a matter of when, not if.

            For example, the planned Square Kilometer Array radio telescope being built by an international consortium could detect a powerful pulsed beacon anywhere in the galaxy. But such beacons might simply be overlooked as anomalous pulsating neutron stars.

           But an unequivocally artificial transmission should eventually pop up. Once the shock and awe of at last realizing we're not alone in the universe has settled in, there will be a spirited debate over whether we should send a response to the aliens.

            

                 But who speaks for Earth? 

         John Billingham of the SETI Institute, and James Benford of Microwave Sciences in Lafayette, Calif., say that in anticipation of such a “Day the Earth Stood Still” moment, we need to establish an international symposium now to reach a consensus on how and if we should respond to E.T.

        They would like to see a moratorium on any METI (Message to Extraterrestrial Intelligence) broadcasts until such discussions take place.

        What’s been transmitted to the stars so far is pretty innocuous: musical melodies performed on the Theremin, binary bilingual Russian and English greetings, Facebook message style text files, and modern day hieroglyphics.

         At first glance I think the worry about talking to aliens is melodramatic considering that their signal would probably come from hundreds or even thousands of light-years away. Like it or not, the sheer size of the galaxy imposes heavy duty roaming charges that make it implausible that extraterrestrials will ever engage in a two-way conversation with us. That is, unless the science fiction dream of faster-than-light "subspace" chatter is realized. The paradox is that you would receive an answer from E.T. before you transmitted a question.

          Equally melodramatic is the authors’ concern that a broadcast from Earth might endanger our species. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking made world headlines last year when he said that contact with extraterrestrials will be dangerous.

         Hawking cited anthropological examples where an advanced culture crushes an inferior culture. But this is horribly simplistic when applied to alien minds evolved under alien suns.

Hawking doesn’t know any more about the mindset and mores of extraterrestrial civilizations that anyone else on Earth does. It’s naïve to think that they would be bellicose or altruistic.

          My best guess is that they are at least curious -- or else they wouldn't blow their science budget on building a transmitter. But curious in an aloof sort of way. This is as H.G. Wells described the Martians in his 1898 classic “The War of the Worlds,” as possessing minds that are “vast, cool, and unsympathetic.”

         Finally, I would argue that any number of curious civilization already know we are here by observing Earth passing in front of the sun, just as NASA’s Kepler Space Observatory is now doing in search of Earth clones across the galaxy.

          Alien astronomers who are not much more technologically advanced than us may have already spectroscopically sniffed Earth’s atmosphere and found that it screams of a planet covered with life -- especially methane polluting cows.

 

         More advanced alien observations might measure the glow of our city lights on the nighttime side of our planet. And, monstrous radio antenna arrays the size of the city of Chicago might have already picked up the faint whisper of TV, radio and radar signals leaking off of our planet.

         Bear in mind that this latter experiment can only work to a range of several dozen light years -- the length of time our civilization has had telecommunications. And, the leak off signals get so weak and jumbled they are quickly lost in galactic radio noise. It would be like trying to hear the sound of a penny dropped inside a bustling airport terminal.

         Finally, if E.T. has the same worries that Billingham, Benford, and Hawking have, then maybe nobody’s transmitting and everyone’s only listening.

That said, one text message now headed for the stars reads:

“You are cordially invited to an interplanetary barbeque 6:00 p.m. 4, October 2452 at my place. BYO beer and meat. RSVP.”

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Posted in: alien life,E.T.,message,SETI Institute