The search for decades of life elsewhere in the universe is consolidating at a crescendo in 2021.
Driving the news: Three new missions from Mars are expected to arrive on the red planet in February and a powerful space telescope is expected to 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 rocks to return to Earth on a future mission, so scientists can analyze them for life signs that may include fossilized suggestions that microbes lived on 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 would affect our understanding of any life spent on Mars.
The launch of NASA is also expected its delayed James Webb space telescope, which could help scientists collect more data about habitable planets around other stars.
- The hunts for smart life that create radio waves, including the well-funded Breakthrough Listen project, also continue to methodically search the skies to find these possible signs of life.
- China’s largest FAST radio telescope plans to allow international scientists to use the powerful tool in 2021.
Between lines: The search for life today is not just about finding Earth 2.0 or even microbial life on Mars.
- Scientists are following last year’s discovery that there may be a gas in Venus ’atmosphere that could indicate life in the planet’s clouds.
- This finding helps expand the scope of the search for life elsewhere, according to astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen.
- “[I]It doesn’t have to be a warm beach next to a tropical ocean somewhere where some protein chains join, ”Christiansen told Axios.
The general picture: Astronomer Frank Drake estimated that there are about 10,000 detectable societies in our galaxy.
- If correct, “[y]you should look at a few million [star systems] to find one, ”astronomer Seth Shostak of SETI told Axios. Now, he says, researchers are getting closer and closer to the survey of many stars.
- So far, the hunt for life beyond Earth has only focused on exploring a relatively small amount of the sky to find radio waves from other places, and scientists have only recently discovered that most stars have planets around it.
What to see: LUVOIR and HabEx, two space telescopes proposed by NASA that it is studying to build, would characterize and possibly find Earth-like worlds around distant stars.
- “This is the holy grail in terms of seeking life, because it’s the only place we know life has passed: on an Earth-like planet around a star like the Sun,” Christiansen said.
Yes, but: While all of these missions will prepare scientists to find out more about whether and where life might exist elsewhere in our universe, there is no guarantee that they will actually find it.
- Scientists have found evidence of possible lives on Mars and potentially habitable planets for years, but knowing if any hard evidence is really a sign of life is much harder.
- “The real problem is that there can be no guarantee that if this amount of money is spent, success will be reserved,” Shostak said about hunting radio waves in particular.
- These missions, however, will focus the search.