"several of your astronaut's have made claim to witnessing UFOs on space flights. should NASA astronauts be ignored?"
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NASA's Carl Sagan Fellows to Study Extraterrestrial Worlds
NASA announced Wednesday the new Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowships in Exoplanet Exploration, created to inspire the next generation of explorers seeking to learn more about planets, and possibly life, around other stars.
Planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, are being discovered at a staggering pace, with more than 300 currently known. Decades ago, long before any exoplanets had been found, the late Carl Sagan imagined such worlds, and pioneered the scientific pursuit...
September 8, 2008 / Written by: NASA Press Release
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ASTID Funds 15 New Projects
The Astrobiology Science and Technology Instrument Development (ASTID) Program this summer approved 15 proposals for funding, including mission concept studies and concept studies for small payloads and satellites.
The new projects were selected out of 97 proposals submitted in response to the NASA Science Mission Directorate’s 2007 Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences (ROSES) solicitation. The new projects range from instruments for astrobiology investigations on future planetary exploration missions to a prototype artificial-gravity platform for small...
August 26, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Washington Post Covers Astrobiology
In yesterday’s edition of the Washington Post, writer Marc Kauffman discusses the “…scientific explosion taking place in astrobiology.”
July 21, 2008 / Posted by: Daniella Scalice
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Is There Life on Mars? Ask a Magnet.
Between three and four billion years ago, Mars was a lot like Earth. Both planets are believed to have had surface water. Those similarities make it a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life. “The assumption is that if bacterial life emerged on Earth at that time, then why not on Mars?” says Soon Sam Kim, principal member of technical staff...May 5, 2008 / Written by: James Kling
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NASA’s Wine Sniffer
“I admit I never actually wrote this goal into my grant,” UC Berkeley Professor of Chemistry Richard Mathies told me, as one of his graduate students injected a drop of Zinfandel into Mathies’s organic analyzer. “But it is an important demonstration” that the detector actually works.
The device in Mathies’s lab is a prototype of the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA). Along with several other components, MOA has been selected by NASA to be part of the Urey instrument...
March 3, 2008 / Written by: Henry Bortman
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New Astrobiology Roadmap Due in '08
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...
February 13, 2008 / Posted by: Shige Abe
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Astrobiology Prospects ROSE-y
The Astrobiology Program has a bigger budget in fiscal year (FY) 2008 (which began October 1, 2007) than it did for FY 2007, thanks to NASA Associate Administrator for Science Alan Stern and Planetary Sciences Division Director Jim Green. In one of his first actions at NASA, Stern allocated $1 million of his discretionary funds to the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) to provide for continuity of membership beyond calendar year 2008. In additional action, Green allocated...
February 13, 2008 / Written by: Linda Billings
