“It’s not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system,” said Marc Kuchner, an author on a new Venus study and astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is right in our neighborhood. I think the most exciting thing about this result is it suggests a new population of asteroids that probably holds clues to how the solar system formed.”
One of NASA’s goals is to search for life on other planets like Mars, where there was once flowing water and a thick atmosphere, or moons of the outer solar system like Europa and Enceladus, where vast water oceans churn under thick layers of ice. What if life on those worlds doesn’t use our DNA? How could we recognize it? A new DNA breakthrough may be the key to answering these questions and many more.
“We think of water as this special, magical compound,” said William M. Farrell, a plasma physicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who helped develop the simulation. “But here’s what’s amazing: every rock has the potential to make water, especially after being irradiated by the solar wind.”
Humanity may not have to wait much longer to get our first evidence of E.T., NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said recently at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory headquarters. Bridenstine isn’t the only NASA leader to express optimism about the alien-life hunt. In 2015, Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist from 2013 to 2016, who predicted that NASA would find “proof of alien life in 20 years.”
“Creative thinking and problem solving are the very things that are really going to matter on a Mars mission,” said Leslie DeChurch, who leads the ATLAS research laboratory is currently working with NASA’s Human Research Program to solve hard problems about teamwork in space explorer teams. “We need the crew to be getting the right answer 100 percent of the time.”
NASA has selected a new space mission, SPHEREx, that will deliver an unprecedented map of the Milky Way containing ‘fingerprints’ from the first moments in the universe’s history, said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “And we’ll have new clues to one of the greatest mysteries in science: What made the universe expand so quickly less than a nanosecond after the big bang?”
