The decades-long search for life elsewhere in the universe will reach a peak in 2021.
Driving the news: Three new Mars missions are scheduled to arrive on the Red Planet in February, and a powerful space telescope is expected to finally be launched this year.
Details: The landing site of NASA’s Perseverance rover is believed to be the geological remains of a river delta – and one of the best places on Mars to look for signs of past life.
- The rover will also cache interesting-looking rocks for return to Earth on a future mission, so scientists can analyze them for features of life that may contain fossilized evidence that microbes once lived in those rocks.
- Two Mars missions from China and the United Arab Emirates will also study the Red Planet, focusing on the geology and atmosphere that would affect our understanding of any past life on Mars.
NASA is also expected to be launched its long-delayed James Webb space telescope, which could help scientists collect more data on habitable planets around other stars.
- The hunt for intelligent life that creates radio waves, including the well-funded Breakthrough Listen project, also continues to methodically search the air for these possible signs of life.
- China’s FAST radio telescope – the largest in the world – plans to enable international scientists to use the powerful tool by 2021.
Between the lines: Today’s search for life is not just about finding Earth 2.0 or even microbial life on Mars.
- Scientists follow last year’s discovery that there may be a gas in Venus’s atmosphere that could indicate life in the planet’s clouds.
- That finding helps broaden the scope of the search for life elsewhere, said astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen.
- “[I]It doesn’t have to be a sultry beach on the side of a tropical ocean, where a few strands of proteins meet, ”Christiansen told Axios.
The big picture: The famous astronomer Frank Drake estimated that there are on the order of about 10,000 detectable societies in our galaxy.
- If that’s right, “[y]You have to look at a few million [star systems] to find one, ”astronomer Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute told Axios. Now, he says, researchers are getting closer to examining so many stars.
- So far, the hunt for life outside the Earth has focused only on scanning a relatively small portion of the sky for radio waves from elsewhere, and scientists have only recently discovered that most stars have planets around them.
What to watch: LUVOIR and HabEx, two proposed space telescopes NASA is considering building, could potentially characterize and locate Earth-like worlds around distant stars.
- “That’s the holy grail in terms of the search for life, because that’s the only place we know that life happened: on an Earth-like planet around a star like the sun,” said Christiansen.
Yes but: While all of these missions prompt scientists to find out if and where life exists elsewhere in our universe, there is no guarantee that they will actually find it.
- Scientists have for years found clues to possible life on Mars and possibly habitable planets, but it is much more difficult to know whether hard evidence is actually a sign of life.
- “The real problem is that you can’t guarantee success if you spend this amount,” Shostak said of the radio wave hunt in particular.
- However, these missions will focus the quest.