The decades-long search for life elsewhere in the universe is building to a crescendo in 2021.
Send the news: Three new Mars missions will arrive at the Red Planet in February and a powerful space telescope is expected to finally launch this year.
Details: NASA’s Persa-Rover landing site is suspected to be the geological remains of a river delta – and one of the best places on Mars to look for signs of past lives.
- The rover will also put interesting rocks in the closet to return to Earth during a future mission, allowing scientists to analyze them on signatures of life, which may contain fossilized hints that microbes lived in those rocks.
- Two Mars missions from China and the United Arab Emirates will also study the Red Planet, focusing on its geology and atmosphere, which will affect our understanding of any previous life on Mars.
NASA is also expected to launch the long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope, which could help scientists gather more data on habitable planets around other stars.
- Hunting for an intelligent life that creates radio waves, including the well-funded breakthrough project, also continues to explore the airspace into these possible signs of life.
- China’s FAST radio telescope – the largest in the world – plans to allow international scientists to use the powerful instrument in 2021.
Between the lines: The search for life today is not just about finding Earth 2.0 or even microbial life on Mars.
- Scientists are following up on last year’s discovery that there may be a gas in the atmosphere of Venus that could indicate life in the clouds of the planet.
- The finding helps increase the scope of the search for life elsewhere, according to astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen.
- “[I]It does not have to be a soft beach on the side of a tropical ocean where some proteins come together, ‘Christiansen told Axios.
The whole picture: Astronomer Frank Drake famously estimates that there are about 10,000 detectable societies in our galaxy.
- If it’s correct, “[y]You need 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 capturing so many stars.
- So far, the life hunt outside Earth has only focused on scanning a relatively small amount of air to radio waves from elsewhere, and scientists have only recently discovered that most stars have planets around them.
What to look for: LUVOIR and HabEx, two proposed space telescopes that NASA is considering building, will likely characterize and find Earth-like worlds around distant stars.
- “This is the holy grail in terms of the search for life, because it is the place where we know that life took place: on an earthy planet around a star like the sun,” Christiansen said.
Yes, but: While all of these missions will help scientists find out more about whether and where life may exist elsewhere in our universe, there is no guarantee that they will really find it.
- Scientists have for years found hints of possible life on Mars and possibly habitable planets, but it is much harder to know if any hard evidence is a sign of life.
- “The real problem is that you can not guarantee that if you spend this amount of money, you will discuss your success,” Shostak said especially about radio wave hunts.
- However, these missions will focus the search.