Sentences with phrase «chemical signatures of life»

Gaia's founding scientist James Lovelock formulated Gaia theory while working for NASA seeking chemical signatures of life on other planets.

Since Viking, though, NASA has mostly played it safe, scouring Mars's surface not for the chemical signatures of life but for ancient habitable environments — the goal of the Curiosity rover.

This milestone will inevitably spark another revolution, as observers redouble their efforts to see Earth - like worlds directly and probe their atmospheres for the telltale chemical signatures of life.

Not exact matches

There are precious few chemical signatures we could look at as evidence of life, and in most cases other explanations exist for those observations.

At each site, Dragonfly would sample the surface and atmosphere with a suite of carefully selected science instruments that will characterize the habitability of Titan's environment, investigate how far prebiotic chemistry progressed, and search for chemical signatures indicative of water - and / or hydrocarbon - based life.

Chemical signatures of the ocean water the organisms lived in are locked into the composition of their shells, and researchers can analyze them for evidence of past water temperatures and other oceanographic conditions.

The spacecraft's sensitive spectrometer was able to register the chemical signatures not only of water vapor but also of hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide — all precursors of the more complex molecules that scientists think eventually gave rise to life on Earth.

I'm confident that we'll detect signs of life on exoplanets (planets around other stars) by observing the atmospheres of the planets that we're detecting now — especially those similar to Earth in mass and orbit — and finding oxygen and other chemical signatures there.

2 By studying the record of Earth's history contained in sedimentary rocks from the time just prior to the rise of animals, between 1200 and 650 million years ago, reading these rocks for clues about changing environmental conditions by chemical analysis, and systematically scouring them for traces of life — from fossils as well as chemical signatures;

«We discovered that this incredible region is a patchwork mosaic of trees with chemical signatures organized into communities to maximize their growth potential given their local soils and elevation — two geological factors they must negotiate as living organisms.