NASA grant of $ 7 million could help discover extraterrestrial life »



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Scientists say NASA has awarded nearly $ 7 million to an effort to develop a new type of alien life detection system that could be used on Mars.

The interdisciplinary project, called the Laboratory of Agnostic Biosigns, will develop. a new clbad of life-sensing approaches to use in planetary missions – from the basement of Mars to the confines of our solar system.

"Time and time again, we have been shaken by the indescribable strangeness of other worlds," said Sarah Stewart Johnson, of Georgetown University, United States.

"Still, the search for extraterrestrial life is often based on badumptions based on Johnson, the project's lead researcher.

NASA's astrobiology program awarded the $ 7 million grant to this effort explicitly aimed at the hypothesis that life in space will resemble life in us …

"Detecting life in an agnostic way means not using the characteristics of life on earth," he said. Heather Graham, Assistant Principal Investigator of the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center

For example, the team will examine the states of imbalance with the environment surrounding the environment, such as the highlighting of obvious chemical complexity or unexpected accumulations of chemical elements, said Graham.

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The important thing for the project is to identify indicators that are not They are not biased towards the specific type of biochemistry found on Earth.

Life detection methods must also be suitable for possible implementation on flight missions.

"Our goal is to go beyond what we currently understand and find ways to find life forms that we can hardly imagine," Johnson said.

The project will also explore ways to think about the discovery of life in terms of probabilities and thresholds, as opposed to looking for a simple "yes" or "no" about whether life has been discovered.

The results may be more disastrous than "yes, we found life" or "no, we did not do it," said Johnson. To do this, we will have to think less about whether life fits our preconceptions about what life is, and more about how to quantify the difference. According to researchers, the project will support computer efforts to develop probabilistic models and theoretical, some of which will depend on advanced algorithmic and machine learning techniques.

He will also oversee the badysis of a wide range of organic and inorganic substrates, including abiotic meteorite extracts, which will be used to develop and refine these tools and algorithms, they said.

edited by Business Standard staff and automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)

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