New Astrobiology Roadmap Due in '08

February 13, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe

A team of NASA and external representatives of the science community is in the process of updating NASA’s 2003 astrobiology roadmap. A draft revised roadmap, to be finalized later in 2008, is publicly available for review and comment online here.

The last iteration of the roadmap was issued in September 2003. The fundamental questions framing the roadmap – How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? What is the future of life on Earth and beyond? – remain unchanged in the draft revised roadmap. The basic principles identified as “fundamental to the implementation of NASA’s astrobiology program” remain essentially unchanged. Rapid advances in the field of astrobiology dictate revision of further details of the roadmap to reflect new findings and new research questions arising since 2003 in research on habitable planets, life in our solar system, origins of life, Earth’s early biosphere, evolution and environment and the limits of life, the future of life on Earth and beyond, and signatures of life, NASA plans to unveil the updated roadmap at a town-meeting session during AbSciCon 2008.