Earth and Mineral Sciences

EarthTalks: NASA researcher to discuss search for life in the solar system

This solar system montage of the nine planets and four large moons of Jupiter in our solar system are set against a false-color view of the Rosette Nebula. Credit: NASA/JPL/ASUAll Rights Reserved.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Are we alone in the universe? That question has perplexed humanity throughout the centuries and spurred many of our modern space exploration programs. Lu Chou, a postdoctoral research associate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, will present an overview of NASA’s search for extraterrestrial life using techniques for finding “life as we don’t know it” at 4 p.m. Monday, April 10, in 112 Walker Building on Penn State's University Park campus.

The search for extraterrestrial life hinges upon our understanding of biosignatures, the chemical and physical imprints associated with life. Knowledge of biosignatures is often impeded by our biases toward Terran, or Earth-based, life. Because life elsewhere may be based on substantially different chemistries and may not necessarily share the same biosignatures as life on Earth, NASA has started a major project to explore for signs of life very different from what we have on Earth. 

Novel biosignatures, which may have unfamiliar features and chemistries that are agnostic to life's molecular makeup or metabolism and may represent processes of life as-yet unrecognized, are referred to as “agnostic biosignatures.” Agnostic biosignatures do not presuppose any particular biochemistry, and can be analyzed for complexity, regardless of their specific chemical constituents.

Mass spectrometers that reveal molecular complexity, chemical structures and patterns will play an important role in the future of agnostic biosignature detection. Chou will discuss NASA’s efforts of employing mass spectrometry in the hunt for extraterrestrial life in her talk, titled "Searching for life as we don’t know it using planetary mass spectrometry.” 

Chou received her bachelor of science degree in microbiology from the University of Maryland and her doctorate in earth and environmental sciences from the University of Illinois.

Chou’s talk is part of the Penn State Earth and Environmental Systems Institute's spring 2023 EarthTalks speaker series, “Exploration of our Solar System.” We now live in the golden age of solar system exploration. With a dozen NASA missions currently in development — as well as spacecraft actively on Mars, near Jupiter and in the Kuiper belt — the current scale of mission activity is unprecedented and brings forth a new era of comparative study of varied worlds at the systems level. The spring 2023 EarthTalk series is intended to provide a venue for the expansion of participant’s horizons into our solar system. 

Talks also are available via Zoom. For more information about the spring 2023 series, visit the EarthTalks webpage.

Last Updated April 5, 2023

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