ASU Research E-Magazine: Looking for Life Beyond the Earth

Understanding the nuances of life is essential if the goal is to find new life forms, particularly when the search extends to hostile alien environments.

For years, ASU scientists have engaged in a disparate, but broad-based search for ancient and current life forms, both on Earth and throughout our solar system. They use a variety of advanced technologies as they search, ranging from sophisticated molecular analysis techniques, to robots and advanced sensors for exploring distant planets and moons.

Regardless of their discipline, however, the central unifying question has always been the same: Does life exist beyond the Earth?

Now, thanks to a new NASA research initiative, the once disparate efforts of ASU researchers will be connected by more than similar goals. Earlier this year, ASU was one of five university partners selected for membership in NASA’s new “virtual” Astrobiology Institute.

The institute will coordinate ongoing ASU research with the work of scientists at other institutions around the country. The Astrobiology Institute plans to take advantage of the next generation of Internet technology. It will be administered by the Ames Research Center in California, NASA’s center of excellence for astrobiology and information technology.

The new institute will use Next Generation Internet (NGI) and advanced telecommunications to link together the investigators and students at separate member institutions around the country. The NGI will also be used to speed the development of many “virtual” institute activities, and to advance research and education in astrobiology.

“I’m excited for the whole university,” says Jack Farmer, who coordinated the successful ASU proposal. Farmer joins ASU this fall as a professor of geology after working as a research scientist with the exobiology branch of the NASA Ames Research Center.

Looking to the future, NASA’s new initiative and ASU are a natural fit, says Jonathan Fink, ASU’s interim vice provost for research.

“ASU’s participation in the NASA Astrobiology Institute places Arizona in the forefront of a world-class research effort to study life in the universe. Recent discoveries of organisms that exist in extreme environments on Earth, together with the discovery of planets in other solar systems and the evidence suggesting that water is present elsewhere in our own solar system hint at the possibility that life may exist elsewhere,” he says.

“We will be exploring how life might develop in nonterrestrial environments. In the process, we hope to gain new insights on how life developed on Earth.” —James Hathaway