• Question: are you trying to fine live in space

    Asked by snowball007 to Alexander, Aron, Jess, Neil on 19 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Alexander Finch

      Alexander Finch answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Hello! Me, personally, am not trying to find life in space. My job involves looking down at planet Earth. Although sometimes we are looking for life on Earth!

      There are many people who are looking for life on other planets and further away, like around other stars. I believe Neil does this – perhaps he can explain more?

    • Photo: Jessica Marshall

      Jessica Marshall answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Yes- scientists are always looking to see where life could exist. Where I work there’s a team working on the ESA exomars project- to send a robot to mars to look for life. But we are also looking elsewhere, and trying to understand what life would need. This is on other moons, like Titan and Europa, and also beginning to look at planets around other stars.

    • Photo: Neil Bowles

      Neil Bowles answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Yes and no. Finding life is a very hard question to answer, think about the question ‘is there life on Mars’?.

      We’ve sent two spacecraft landers to Mars in the 1970s (Viking 1+2) that were designed to search for life, or at least the chemicals that make up life, and the results were not positive. However, this just shows that at the landing sites there were no traces, this is different to saying that there is no life on Mars today or in the past. What we’ve done since is look for places on Mars, or Europa (moon of Jupiter) or Enceladus (moon of Saturn) or other places where the conditions for life might be OK, and then target these missions in the future. So, ExoMars will carry a drill to dig down 2m or so into the surface and see what it can find.

      So the I’m interested in finding conditions that right for life first, and the building something to look for it. Its an interesting problem. What do you think would be needed for life, what should we look for?

    • Photo: Aron Kisdi

      Aron Kisdi answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Yes, but that is only part of what we do, we have much more missions trying to understand how the solar system and the universe works and try to enable us sending better technology and people into space.

      Also it is important to see if we can find conditions which can support life (as we know it) even if there is no life, you can be easier to send people to such a place easier.

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