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The Alien Next Door: Best Bets For Where To Find Life In Our Solar System
By Roxanne Palmer: Subscribe to Roxanne’s
August 11, 2012 1:04 PM EDT
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Saturn’s moon Enceladus is one of the better candidates for a place in our solar system that could support life.
The two-year mission of the Mars Science Laboratory — better known as Curiosity — has just begun. Curiosity packs a lot more technical punch than its precursor rovers – it’s armed with sophisticated tools that can vaporize rocks in order to analyze their chemical composition and drill into the Martian surface to collect geological samples.
If it finds evidence that the Red Planet once supported life, Curiosity will have more than justified its $2.5 billion price tag. But Mars isn’t the only place in our solar system that scientists think might have had “the right stuff” for life.
Red Planet, Blue Water?
Researchers have long suspected there is, or has been, life on Mars because of the planet’s ice caps, and much of Curiosity’s mission focuses on expanding our knowledge of any possible Martian oceans that may have existed millions of years ago.
As far as we know, the absence of liquid water is the primary deal-breaker when it comes to the development of life on other planets. Various geological features seem to resemble the shores of ancient oceans or look like canyons cut by water flowing.
This past week, a research team led by University of Texas at Austin researcher Lorena Moscardelli pointed out in a paper in the journal GSA Today that large, polygon-shaped formations on the Martian surface are eerily similar to formations on the deep-sea floor here on Earth. Moscardelli has also argued that teardrop-shaped islands on Mars were made deep beneath an ancient sea as sediment flows were warped around craters into elongated shapes.
There have been other clues pointing to Martian life. The Allan Hills 84001 meteorite found in Antarctica in 1984, thought to have fallen from Mars, vaulted into the news in 1996 when a team led by NASA scientist David McKay claimed that tiny globules on the meteorite’s surface resembled fossilized bacteria-like life forms.
In 2009, NASA researchers took another look at the meteorite with more advanced instruments. While they couldn’t conclusively prove that the formations were life, they were able to rule out some of the alternative explanations that various formations were actually made by heating.
“We believe that the biogenic hypothesis is stronger now than when we first proposed it 13 years ago,” NASA scientist Everett Gibson said in 2009.
