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Cu Team Gets $5m To Study Origin Of Life

Posted on: Thursday, 26 June 2003, 06:00 CDT

University of Colorado researchers will receive $5 million from NASA to study the origin of life on Earth and to find the best places to look for traces of life on other planets.

A CU team was among 12 "astrobiology" centers selected Tuesday by NASA. The funding will be paid over five years.

"This represents a significant expansion of our program and will allow us to move in exciting new directions," said CU planetary scientist Bruce Jakosky.

The NASA-funded University of Colorado Center for Astrobiology was created in 1998 and was funded for five years. Tuesday's award provides a five-year funding extension.

CU researchers will work with Denver's Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Boulder's Ball Aerospace & Technologies to devise the tools needed to find evidence of life beyond Earth.

Two unmanned NASA rovers are scheduled to land on Mars in January and will search for dried-up lake beds and other long-gone water sources.

If the rovers locate minerals that formed in water, other robotic explorers could be sent to probe those sediments for fossilized microbes.

"But finding them is not straightforward," Jakosky said Tuesday. "We need to think more about what measurements we need to make and what technologies we need to develop to carry out those missions."

Another goal of NASA's astrobiology effort is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, then to analyze the atmospheres of those alien worlds for evidence of life. CU researchers will work with Ball and Lockheed Martin to develop techniques to do it with Earth-orbiting telescopes.

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