Home

On:

Just as NASA was about to solve the mystery of whether or not there is life on Mars, the world went broke and both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) had to back off on their plans to send astronauts and rovers there to find out. Two NASA missions to Mars–one in 2016 and another in 2018–have been canceled.

In the March 13 edition of the New York Times, Kenneth Chang quotes Planetary Society director Bill Nye as saying, "The pipeline is being shut off, and that’s not what anyone wants. We are closer than anyone has ever been to discovering life on another world."
read more

On:

One reason we may not have discovered the definitive answer to the question of whether there is life on Mars is because we have not used the right TOOLS to detect it. But now NASA is getting ready to send a life-detection tool to Mars that is 1,000 times more sensitive than previous instruments. Astronomer Jeffrey Bada says, "The bottom line is that if life is out there, the high-tech tools of chemistry will find it sooner or later. It certainly is starting to look like there may be something alive out there somewhere, with Mars being the most accessible place to search."
read more

On:

It’s been discovered that DNA can travel on a meteorite, meaning that life on Earth could have been seeded from another planet–maybe even Mars. If that’s the case, we don’t need to look for life on Mars–we’re looking at it every time we see another human being!

On the MSNBC website, Charles Q. Choi quotes chemist Jim Cleaves as saying, "People have been finding nucleobases in meteorites for about 50 years now, and have been trying to figure out if they are of biological origin or not."
read more