Courtesy of NASA/JPL
The Gusev Crater, Mars Rover Spirit’s new home, is an ideal spot to look for byproducts of life. Thought to be an old lakebed, the crater could reveal microbial fossils.
Bruce Jakosky has heard the jibes: "Jakosky's gone off the deep end." "Have you found any green men yet?" Or the most painful one: "What's it like to study a subject without a subject matter?" Such comments were common in the early days of astrobiology, a term coined by NASA just six years ago to denote the science of determining the origins of life here on Earth and beyond it.
Jakosky, the director of the Astrobiology Institute at the University of Colorado, was surprised by the reaction to his speech entitled "Astrobiology as an Integrating Theme for Solar System Discovery" given at the American Geophysical Union Conference in San Francisco in mid-December. All the comments, says Jakosky, ...
