NASA programs and missions have begun to include the search for life as a prominent objective. Yet, traditional exploration paradigms have focused on a binary approach regarding the selection of…

This is a $1,863,335.80 cooperative agreement awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Shared Services Center to Blue Marble Space, a U.S.-based international non-profit organization. The agreement supports research to develop a framework for characterizing the degree of habitability and biosignatures on planetary bodies within and beyond the solar system, moving beyond a binary assessment of the presence or absence of liquid water. The research aims to understand how evolutionary processes allow life to emerge and expand to different environments. The agreement establishes a Center for Life Detection Science to compile information, facilitate community dialogue, and recommend priorities for research and technology development related to life detection. This is not a set-aside contract. Blue Marble Space has received previous NASA funding through contracts and grants for related work in astrobiology, planetary habitability, and STEM education.

NASA programs and missions have begun to include the search for life as a prominent objective. Yet, traditional exploration paradigms have focused on a binary approach regarding the selection of planetary sites of interest: the presence or absence of liquid water. This proposal aims to support work on a new framework for the characterization and interpretation of habitability and biosignatures for planetary bodies within and beyond the solar system. This framework moves beyond a binary characterization of the presence or absence of liquid water, or whether a putative biosignature is biotic or abiotic. Instead, the effort seeks to characterize the degree of habitability of different planetary environments by considering other requirements for life, and aims to assess the ability of a biosphere to produce detectable biosignatures after considering energy limitations on productivity, as well as biosignature degradation processes. But how were these biosignatures emplaced initially? To address this, this proposal aims to further support research on how evolutionary processes can allow life to emerge and then expand to different environments? Evolution that drives inanimate matter to become animate has to be open-ended, i.e. continually produce novel and adaptive forms. Also, any form of life that cannot liberate itself from the initial prebiotic niche is unlikely to survive. Thus, in order for life to become a planetary phenomenon, IT needs to evolve a mechanism to control its functions in different environments while preserving the machinery of open-ended evolution. How this happens remains largely unknown. Recent advances in in vitro evolution techniques, high throughput sequencing and computational methods of bioinformatics and molecular modeling will allow US to explore this issue through systematic, integrated scientific inquiry. The scientific underpinning and context that allow this research to be pursued in a rigorous and informed fashion is clearly dispersed through a diversity of sources and disciplines. With this in mind, this proposal seeks to further support the establishment of a center for life detection science (clds), the purpose of which will be to: (i) compile, organize, and curate a living repository of information and community dialog relating to life detection science; and (II) identify and recommend priority areas for community engagement, research, and technology development that will best support the life detection endeavor. The activity will adopt and build on the ladder of life detection as its basic structure, and will use the hypothesis browser as the functional means of organizing information and maintaining an evolvable, living document.