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Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

NASA Awards $7 Million to Search for Extraterrestrial Life

GEORGETOWN MEDICAL CENTER
The Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures led by Sarah Johnson and her team were awarded a $7 million grant from NASA to search for extraterrestrial life.

NASA awarded a $7 million grant to Georgetown University biology professor Sarah Johnson and a team of researchers to work on a project in search of extraterrestrial life.

The Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures led by Johnson and her team is working to pioneer a new way of approaching the search for life outside of planet Earth, focusing on Mars and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The NASA funding is set to continue for the next five years. LAB is a collaborative effort of 15 members from universities and scientific research institutions from around the world.

LAB researchers plan to work alongside existing efforts to find life outside of Earth, including the team for NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012. Past efforts to locate life or the remnants of life on Mars through traditional methods, including searching for the presence of water, have been unsuccessful.

Johnson’s research will aim to find new methods of searching for extraterrestrial life, according to a Nov. 2 news release.

“Time and again, we’ve been bowled over by the indescribable foreignness of other worlds,” Johnson said in the news release. “Our goal is to go beyond what we currently understand and devise ways to find forms of life we can scarcely imagine.”

Johnson’s project was chosen for its attention to the development of new technology to find life outside of earth, according to Lindsay Hays, deputy program scientist of the NASA Astrobiology Program.

“It was considered highly meritorious scientifically, and the proposed goals and objectives for this project were well-aligned with one of the new research coordination networks that the NASA Astrobiology Program was seeking to start up centered on life detection science and technology development,” Hays wrote in an email to The Hoya.

Past researchers have searched for molecular frameworks that are present on Earth, as well as resources like water that have been deemed critical for the evolution of living beings.

Recent scientific discoveries of new life forms, including microorganisms like archaea and bacteria, fuel Johnson’s research and make her optimistic about the possibility of finding extraterrestrial life, according to Johnson.

“Novel bacteria and archaea are continually being found in what were previously believed to be lifeless niches – from sea ice, to the deep subsurface, to the high atmosphere,” Johnson wrote in an email to The Hoya.

Johnson’s project will reevaluate the current methods of looking for life on other planets as a part of NASA’s wider effort to explore potentially habitable environments, according to Hays.

“This project will seek to understand how to identify life that is truly alien, and help researchers and instrument developers take these ideas into context as NASA moves forward with more Astrobiology and life detection focused missions,” Hays wrote.

Researchers plan to focus on chemical and surface patterns that do not assume new life forms will be similar to life on Earth — key in the search for extraterrestrial life.

With such groundbreaking and experimental work, there is some uncertainty as to whether the initiative will yield fruitful discoveries, according to Hays.

“As with all grants awarded by NASA, LAB will submit annual reports to show progress on the proposed research project; though continued support is dependent on progress, continued relevance to the NASA program, and the availability of funds, this is standard,” Hays wrote.

Hays hopes the initiative will improve and increase scientific collaboration into the future.

“As one of three co-leads to the new Research Coordination Network, the Network for Life Detection (or NfoLD), this team will be part of a larger group working on the science and technology of life detection and facilitate activities for this broader community,” Hays wrote.

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