Megatsunamis and microbial life on early Mars

Life on Mars?

Usually it takes a juicy sex scandal, a military invasion, or an airliner crash to get a story on page one of the newspapers two days in a row. But science reporters across the United States managed this feat in early August, when NASA scientists announced that they’d found “compelling evidence” of fossilized life from Mars. The story broke when a trade paper, Space News, nonchalantly published...

Title Microbial phophatization through deep geological time and its implications to searching for life on MARS

Microbial origin of excess methane in glacial ice and implications for life on Mars.

Methane trapped in the 3,053-m-deep Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 ice core provides an important record of millennial-scale climate change over the last 110,000 yr. However, at several depths in the lowest 90 m of the ice core, the methane concentration is up to an order of magnitude higher than at other depths. At those depths we have discovered methanogenic archaea, the in situ metabolism of ...

Search for life on Mars.

A multi-user integrated suite of instruments designed to optimize the search for evidence of life on Mars is described. The package includes: -Surface inspection and surface environment analysis to identify the potential Mars landing sites, to inspect the surface geology and mineralogy, to search for visible surficial microbial macrofossils, to study the surface radiation budget and surface oxi...

Find Life on Mars entry

Georgia Tech expects to compete in Find Life on Mars with at least two (and potentially four) robots operating as a cooperating group. Research at Georgia Tech and elsewhere has demonstrated the speed and robustness afforded by multiple robot cooperation (Balch et al. 1995a, Balch and Arkin 1995b). The robots, Nomad 150s from Nomadics Technologies, are pictured in Figure 1. The Nomad 150 is a h...