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Finding signs of life on rocky planets and distant ocean worlds

This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the "Quela" drilling location in the "Murray Buttes" area on lower Mount Sharp. Key features on the skyline of this panorama are the dark mesa called "M12" to the left of the rover's mast and pale, upper Mount Sharp to the right of the mast. The top of M12 stands about 23 feet (7 meters) above the base of the sloping piles of rocks just behind Curiosity. The scene combines approximately 60 images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of the rover's robotic arm. Most of the component images were taken on Sept. 17, 2016, during the 1,463rd Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars. Two component images of the drill-hole area in front of the rover were taken on Sol 1466 (Sept. 20) to show the hole created by collecting a drilled sample at Quela on Sol 1464 (Sept. 18).
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the "Quela" drilling location in the "Murray Buttes" area on lower Mount Sharp. Key features on the skyline of this panorama are the dark mesa called "M12" to the left of the rover's mast and pale, upper Mount Sharp to the right of the mast. The top of M12 stands about 23 feet (7 meters) above the base of the sloping piles of rocks just behind Curiosity.

The scene combines approximately 60 images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of the rover's robotic arm. Most of the component images were taken on Sept. 17, 2016, during the 1,463rd Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars. Two component images of the drill-hole area in front of the rover were taken on Sol 1466 (Sept. 20) to show the hole created by collecting a drilled sample at Quela on Sol 1464 (Sept. 18).

Feeling the ripples of rocks and rovers

Martian rovers have been hard at work in search of life.

Last year, NASA’s Perseverance rover collected a sample dubbed “Sapphire Canyon” from a larger vein in an ancient river channel on Mars. The arrowhead-shaped rock is covered in patterns similar to poppyseeds and leopard spots made of iron and phosphate.

These markings are often associated with life, according to Amy Williams, an astrobiologist at the University of Florida, but there’s no way to know definitively without bringing these samples back to Earth.

“Just because it looks like life doesn't mean it is. But it's those kinds of observations that make us pause and say, what are we looking at? Is it possible that we are seeing evidence for what we're calling a potential biosignature,” Williams said.

While Perseverance continues on its mission, NASA’s Curiosity rover just celebrated 13 years on Mars. During its journey, the rover's search for life forever changed how we view the red planet.

“It ended up paradigm shifting in a way in which we're finally able to characterize these environments to understand life would have wanted to live there and start to set the stage to understand that there are all of these habitable environments on Mars where life would have wanted to live,” Williams said. “It's like looking back and realizing that was so important, and you felt it then, but then seeing the scope of it. Now you're like that that really set the stage. That got us started on this new era of robotic rover exploration.”

For over 60 years, NASA sought to answer whether Mars was inhabitable. Recent proposed budget cuts by the Trump Administration disrupt that goal and have impacted the ability of scientists to research and work.

“It's not just science because it's nerdy and cool. We want to learn about it, right? The work that scientists and engineers are doing on planetary missions serves all of society, all of humanity,” Williams said. “We're able to create new technologies that help people. We're able to expand our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe, our ability to be good stewards of our one and only planet.”

Jupiter and Saturn's moon mysteries

Millions of miles away in our solar system are two freezing moons with vast oceans beneath their surface.

On Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa, scientists think that amino acids may exist beneath their surfaces.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Alexander Pavlov led a research paper about these moons. He said that microbiological life exists, but to uncover that evidence, future missions would need to drill through the icy surfaces to see the microbiological life.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region. The view shows heavily cratered northern latitudes at top, transitioning to fractured, wrinkled terrain in the middle and southern latitudes. The wavy boundary of the moon's active south polar region -- Cassini's destination for this flyby -- is visible at bottom, where it disappears into wintry darkness. This view looks towards the Saturn-facing side of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up and rotated 23 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 28, 2015. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 60,000 miles (96,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 1,896 feet (578 meters) per pixel. The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
NASA
NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region. The view shows heavily cratered northern latitudes at top, transitioning to fractured, wrinkled terrain in the middle and southern latitudes. The wavy boundary of the moon's active south polar region -- Cassini's destination for this flyby -- is visible at bottom, where it disappears into wintry darkness. This view looks towards the Saturn-facing side of Enceladus. North on Enceladus is up and rotated 23 degrees to the right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Oct. 28, 2015. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 60,000 miles (96,000 kilometers) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 1,896 feet (578 meters) per pixel. The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.

“We are confident there are for these particular moons,” Pavlov said. “On Enceladus, we actually see the liquid water shooting from the South Pole. On Europa, there’s evidence for the plumes shooting water out but it's much more sporadic. But from the magnetic field measurements, we know that there has to be a liquid ocean—So essentially, you have two ocean worlds life as we know it require liquid water so that in itself by itself, make those moons a prime target for life search.”

On the surface, the terrain of the two moons appears to be inhospitable. But, Pavlov said his research has led him to believe that under the surface could be a world full of microbiological life.

“We have plenty of life in Antarctica on the glacier lakes,” Pavlov said. “There is life deep in the ocean, which has barely any light whatsoever. If you see it on the surface life, as we know it will have troubles, but once you go deep in the ocean under the shell, there's plenty of terrestrial microorganisms, which can handle it.”

Marian is a multimedia journalist at Central Florida Public Media working as a reporter and producer for the 'Are We There Yet?' space podcast.
Brendan Byrne is Central Florida Public Media's Assistant News Director, managing the day-to-day operations of the newsroom, editing daily news stories, and managing the organization's internship program. Byrne also hosts Central Florida Public Media's weekly radio show and podcast "Are We There Yet?" which explores human space exploration, and the weekly news roundup podcast "The Wrap."
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