Lifeboat Foundation

As humans spread out into the cosmos in search of life, the most alien organisms we encounter may be those we bring with us. Researchers at NASA and elsewhere are engineering microbes so they can carry out many of the functions needed to support human life off-planet.

Humans have been harnessing microbes to do useful work for us for millennia. We’ve used them to make bread, beer, and cheese, and more recently they’ve been put to work to produce medicine, provide fertilizer for crops, and even generate biofuels.

But the emerging field of synthetic biology holds the promise of greatly expanding the things microbes can do for us. Advances in gene editing technology are allowing scientist to re – engineer microbes’ genomes to carry out entirely novel functions like producing chemicals not found in nature, acting as biosensors, and even carrying out computation.

Continue reading “Microbes in Space: Bioengineered Bugs Could Help Colonize New Planets” »

Jupiter’s moon Europa could host alien life deep within its icy oceans.

How SETI sifts through cosmic noise to hunt for alien signals.

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TESS is out of this world!

In addition to filling balloons at birthday parties, helium can be found scattered throughout the cosmos. To date, however, scientists have struggled to detect the ubiquitous element on distant worlds, even though the gas is certain to be there. But that’s now changed, thanks to the discovery of helium on a Jupiter-sized world located 200 light-years from Earth—but that’s only part of the story.

“Helium is the second-most common element in the universe after hydrogen. It is also one of the main constituents of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System,” Jessica Spake, the astronomer who made the discovery, said in a statement. “However, up until now helium had not been detected on exoplanets—despite searches for it.”

But now, using Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Spake’s team managed to detect this strangely elusive substance, marking the first time that helium has been detected on a planet outside of our Solar System. The key to the finding was the use of infrared spectra to study the exoplanet’s atmosphere, whereas previous attempts used ultraviolet and optical wavelengths. This study now shows that the composition of exoplanetary atmospheres can indeed be studied at longer wavelengths. The details of this discovery were published yesterday in Nature.

Continue reading “The First Exoplanet Known to Contain Helium Is a Truly Alien World” »

NASA wants to send a space submarine to Saturn’s largest moon in hopes that it will bring us one step closer to discovering alien life.

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Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have conducted the first spectroscopic…survey of the Earth-sized planets (d, e, f, and g) within the habitable zone around the nearby star TRAPPIST-1. This study is a follow-up to Hubble observations made in May 2016 of the atmospheres of the inner TRAPPIST-1 planets b and c. Hubble reveals that at least three of the exoplanets (d, e, and f) do not seem to contain puffy, hydrogen-rich atmospheres similar to gaseous planets such as Neptune…at: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/…/hubble-probes-atmospheres-of…/

NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program, the search for planets and life beyond our solar system.

Speculating about the geological record of a technologically advanced civilization may help in the search for alien societies and poses an important question about our own future on earth.

The planets are rocky and 1.75 times the size of Earth, and are being referred to as ‘super-Earths’ or ‘mini-Neptunes’.