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The decades-long search for life elsewhere in the universe is poised for a crescendo in 2021.
Driving the news: Three new Mars missions are expected to arrive on the Red Planet in February, and a powerful space telescope is finally set to launch 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 rocks of interest for return to Earth on a future mission so that scientists can analyze them for life signatures that could include fossilized clues that microbes once lived in these rocks.
- Two missions to Mars 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 all past life on Mars.
NASA is also expected to launch its long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope, which could help scientists collect more data on habitable planets around other stars.
- The intelligent life hunts that create radio waves, including the well-funded Breakthrough Listen project, also continue to methodically search the skies for these possible signs of life.
- China’s FAST radio telescope – the world’s largest – plans to enable international scientists to use this powerful tool 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 Venus’ atmosphere that could indicate life in the planet’s clouds.
- The discovery helps broaden the search for life elsewhere, according to astrophysicist Jessie Christiansen.
- “[I]It doesn’t have to be a soft beach on the edge of a tropical ocean, somewhere where a few strands of protein meet, ”Christiansen told Axios.
The big picture: Astronomer Frank Drake has estimated that there are approximately 10,000 detectable societies in our galaxy.
- If that’s correct, “[y]You gotta watch a few million [star systems] to find one, ”SETI astronomer Seth Shostak told Axios. Now, he says, researchers are getting closer to surveying so many stars.
- So far, the hunt for life beyond Earth has only focused on scanning a relatively small part of the sky for radio waves from elsewhere and scientists have only discovered only recently that most stars had planets around them.
What to watch: LUVOIR and HabEx, two proposed space telescopes that NASA plans to build, would characterize and possibly find Earth-like worlds around distant stars.
- “It is the holy grail in terms of the search for life because it is the only place where we know that life has occurred: on an Earth similar planet around a star like the Sun”, Christiansen said.
Yes, but: While all of these missions will inspire scientists to determine if and where life might exist elsewhere in our universe, there is no guarantee that they will actually find it.
- Scientists have found signs of possible life on Mars and potentially habitable planets for years, but it’s much more difficult to know if hard evidence is actually a sign of life.
- “The real problem is, you can’t guarantee that if you spend that amount of money, you’ll get success,” Shostak said of radio wave hunts in particular.
- These missions will however concentrate research.
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