The search for decades of life elsewhere in the universe is developing in a crescendo in 2021.
News management: Three new missions to Mars are due to arrive on the red planet in February and a powerful space telescope is expected to be launched this year.
Details: The landing place of NASA’s Perseverance Rover is considered to be the geological remains of a river delta – and one of the best places on Mars to look for signs of past life.
- The rover will also hide interesting rocks to return to Earth on a future mission so scientists can analyze them for life signatures that could include fossilized suggestions that microbes once lived in those rocks. .
- Two missions to Mars in China and the United Arab Emirates will also study the Red Planet, focusing on its geology and atmosphere, which would affect our understanding of any past life on Mars.
NASA is also expected to launch its long-delayed James Webb space telescope, which could help scientists gather more data about habitable planets around other stars.
- Intelligent life hunters who create radio waves, including the well-funded Breakthrough Listen project, also continue to methodically search the sky for these possible signs of life.
- China’s FAST radio telescope – the largest in the world – plans to allow international scientists to use the powerful instrument in 2021.
Between the lines: Searching for life today is not just about finding Earth 2.0 or even microbial life on Mars.
- Scientists are looking at last year’s discovery that there could be a gas in the atmosphere of Venus that could indicate life in the planet’s clouds.
- This discovery helps expand the scope of the search for life elsewhere, according to astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen.
- “[I]It doesn’t have to be a quiet beach on the edge of a tropical ocean somewhere where a few strands of protein come together, “Christiansen told Axios.
The whole picture: Astronomer Frank Drake has estimated that there are about 10,000 detectable societies in our galaxy.
- If it is correct, “[y]you have to look at a few million [star systems] to find one, “said astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute for Axios. Now, he says, researchers are getting closer to the research of many stars.
- So far, hunting for life beyond Earth has focused only on scanning a relatively small amount of sky for radio waves elsewhere, and scientists have only recently learned that most stars have planets around them.
What to look for: LUVOIR and HabEx, two space telescopes proposed by NASA, are considering building, would characterize and possibly find Earth-like worlds around distant stars.
- “This is the holy grail when it comes to the search for life, because this is the only place where we know life happened: on an Earth-like planet, around a star like the Sun,” Christiansen said.
Yes but: While all of these missions will prepare scientists to learn more about and where life might exist elsewhere in our universe, there is no guarantee that they will actually find it.
- Scientists have found clues about a possible life on Mars and potentially habitable planets for years, but knowing if any solid evidence is actually a sign of life is much more difficult.
- “The real problem is that you can’t guarantee that if you spend that amount of money, you’ll reserve success,” Shostak said, especially of radio hunting.
- However, these missions will focus the search.