Lifeboat Foundation

Pleased to have been the guest on this most recent episode of Javier Ideami’s Beyond podcast. We discuss everything from #spaceexploration to #astrobiology!

In this episode, we travel from Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars with Bruce Dorminey. Bruce is a science journalist and author who primarily covers aerospace, astronomy and astrophysics. He is a regular contributor to Astronomy magazine and since 2012, he has written a regular tech column for Forbes magazine. He is also a correspondent for Renewable Energy World. Writer of “Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System”, he was a 1998 winner in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards (AJOYA) as well as a founding team member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Science Communication Focus Group.

Continue reading “From Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars” »

Detecting extrasolar rocky planets capable of hosting life will depend in part on decoding their surface reflectivity and colors.

Microbial life is likely fairly ubiquitous in the cosmos, new statistical models indicate. But extraterrestrial intelligence? Not so much.

Researchers use energy from a next-generation particle accelerator to probe microfossils inside ancient Earth rocks.

Will we ever live on Mars?

Since the dawn of the Space Age, the planet Mars has been the focus of two ambitious projects. One is the search for life forms native to the planet; the other is human colonization.

Continue reading “Life on Mars? Will we find it? Will we colonize the Red Planet?” »

Professor Sara Seager from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believes astronomers should broaden their horizons as they scan the cosmos for life.

She said: ‘Microbes can survive and grow in a 100 percent hydrogen atmosphere. We should expand the types of planets we consider worth searching.’

Continue reading “Alien life might thrive on ‘super-Earths’ made of pure hydrogen” »

Cornell astronomers plot how to take spectra from extrasolar earths trapped in orbits around dying white dwarfs.

On Earth, there are organisms that resist radiation, heat, cold, and drying, even to the point of being able to live in the space vacuum.

Genetic biotechnology is usually discussed in the context of current and emerging applications here on Earth, and rightly so, since we still live exclusively in our planetary cradle. But as humanity looks outward, we ponder what kind of life we ought to take with us to support outposts and eventually colonies off the Earth.

Continue reading “Deep-space travel, colonization may rely on genetically engineered life forms” »

The Dishchii’bikoh meteorite fall in the White Mountain Apache reservation in central Arizona has given scientists a big clue to finding out where so-called LL chondrites call home. They report their results in the April 14 issue of Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

“LL chondrites are fairly common meteorites with low-oxidized and low metallic (LL) iron content,” said Peter Jenniskens, the lead author and meteor astronomer with the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center. “We want to know where they originated because the damaging Chelyabinsk airburst of February 15, 2013 in Russia, was caused by a particularly large 20-meter sized LL chondrite.”

LL chondrites originate from somewhere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where a parent body broke up and created a family of asteroids long ago. Occasional collisions with those family members eject rocks into orbit around the Sun. When these small asteroids collide with Earth’s atmosphere, they cause a bright meteor from which pieces survive sometimes and fall on the ground as meteorites.