NEW YORK: “I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years,” says Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for NASA, at a public panel in Washington last week. “We know where to look, we know how to look, and in most cases we have the technology.”
Jeffery Newmark, interim director of heliophysics at the agency put it this way: “It’s definitely not an if, it’s a when.”
However, if visions of alien invasions are dancing in your head, you can let those go.
“We are not talking about little green men,” says Stofan. “We are talking about little microbes.”
Over the course of an hour-long presentation, NASA leaders describe a flurry of recent discoveries that suggest we are closer than ever to figuring out where we might find life in the Solar System and beyond.
Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA, cites a study that analysed the atmosphere above Mars’ polar ice caps and suggests that 50% of the planet’s northern hemisphere once had oceans up to 1.6km deep, and that it had that water for a long period of time – up to 1.2 billion years.
Tesla driverless system to use updated radar technology
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