Unifying Themes and Future Work in Planetary Astrobiology (In Planetary Astrobiology, 2020)



VPL Authors

Full Citation: Meadows V. S., Arney G. N., Des Marais D. J., and Schmidt B. E. (2020). Unifying themes and future work in planetary astrobiology. In Planetary Astrobiology (V. S. Meadows et al., eds.), pp. 505–516. Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, DOI: 10.2458/azu_uapress_9780816540068-ch019.

Abstract: The development of astrobiology, the study of life in the universe, is intimately tied to the development of spaceflight in the mid to late twentieth century, which enabled the discovery and exploration of non-Earth environments that might harbor life. In 1976, the Viking missions to Mars supported a core goal to search for signs of life beyond Earth (Klein et al., 1972). However, the Viking life detection experiments provided inconclusive evidence of organics and life (e.g., Klein, 1979; Biemann, 1979; Quinn et al., 2013), a result that put a damper on both Mars exploration and exobiology (as astrobiology was known…

URL: https://doi.org/10.2458/azu_uapress_9780816540068

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