| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Finding Life in All the Unlikely, Unexpected Places
Just one of several weather stations set up at Chott El Jerid, a Tunisian saltpan, measuring temperature, humidity, ultraviolet radiation, wind direction and velocity. Image credit: Felipe Goméz/Europlanet
From orbit and on the ground, Mars looks inhospitable. But it doesn’t look much different than the freezing Antarctic plains, sun-baked saltpans in Tunisia or Spain’s corrosively acidic Rio Tinto, according to a few explorers from the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) in Madrid, who today presented some of their findings of life during a press conference at the European Planetary Science Congress.
The biggest difference, however, is that life still thrives in these extreme locales on Earth.
“The big questions are: what is life, how can we define it and what the requirements for supporting life?” asks project leader Dr. Felipe Goméz. “To understand the results we receive back from missions like Curiosity, we need to have detailed knowledge of similar environments on Earth. Metabolic diversity on Earth is huge. We have found a range of complex chemical processes that allow life to survive in unexpected places.”
(…)
Read the rest of Finding Life in All the Unlikely, Unexpected Places (642 words)
© John Williams for Universe Today, 2012. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Curiosity, Mars, Mars Exploration Rover, Mars Science Laboratory, Opportunity
Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh
2012-09-24 21:48:04
Source: http://www.universetoday.com/97540/finding-life-in-all-the-unlikely-unexpected-places/
Source:
