WASHINGTON (States News Service) -- In a small room in the Senate, a few very smart scientists got together and got very excited about a new, wildly interdisciplinary field of study that they feel will chart the future of NASA, of space exploration, of the American imagination, and of the human race: "astrobiology."
It sounds like a science-fiction term, meaning "the study of star life," and its adherents joke that three years ago, they didn't know what the term meant.
But in the last year, NASA has added an astrobiology program and a "virtual institute" made up of eleven top research facilities across the country. Nobel winner Baruch Blumberg, known for his medical research, has recently agreed to run the institute, and was one of the guests at Thursday's Astrobiology Symposium, hosted by the Aerospace States Association.
The field is an intersection of many other fields: astronomy, physics, biology, molecular chemistry, geology and zoology. It includes science on every scale -- from evolution on the single-cell and molecular levels to the behavior of distant stars that betray signs of earth-like planets.
According to NASA's definition, astrobiology seeks to answer three questions:
- How does life begin and evolve?
- Does life exist elsewhere in the universe?
- What is life's future on Earth and beyond?
NASA finished it's preliminary "roadmap" of how to approach the issue about 11 months ago, said Dr. David Morrison, director of the Astrobiology and Space Research programs at Ames Research Center in California, to help define what this neophyte science is.
"The word may not survive, it may turn into "bioastronomy," or "exobiology." That doesn't really matter," Morrison said. "We are at a spot in history where we have the tools and the technology... to finally answer some fundamental questions... that you have all asked, all thought about, all wondered."
To answer those three questions, NASA has proposed
for its astrobiology program. The Astrobiology Institute has been working on them for the last year, while Morrison and others are trying to bring astrobiology experiments to NASA missions.This is actually pretty easy, said Dr. Kathryn Clark, Senior Scientist on the International Space Station (ISS). The animated Clark, who flies around the world every week coordinating science projects for the station, said that astrobiology is so wildly multi-disciplinary that data from almost any project can be analyzed to understand life.
"In some ways you want to make the entire thing astrobiology and put everything else under it," Clark said.
Clark explained to the audience how the ISS will provide an unprecedented laboratory for studying life in space.
"The experiments of astrobiology started in the space station in December when the first astronaut put his grimy little hands in there and contaminated it,"
Clark said. Hosts of microbes and parasites were left behind in the pressurized, microgravity environment of the station, she said.
"We have a wonderful little ecosystem up there that's evolving in a way we've never seen before, and we can study that and see the role of gravity in evolution," she said.
The Astrobiology Institute is also doing research here on Earth.
"Has life evolved to fill all the environmental niches of our own planet?" said Morrison, "We have found that life is incredibly adaptable... at NASA we are particularly interested in areas that are analogous to other planets."
Ames researcher Dr. Jonathan Trent presented footage from recent field work he conducted in Yellowstone National Park. He and two other scientists carried 50-pound packs through the park to several of its natural hot springs to find multi-cellular organisms in this environment -- places seemingly totally inhospitable to life.
Trent's team sent probes with cameras and survey equipment down into the springs' depths, looking for organisms that could thrive "at temperatures of 235 degrees and at a pH (acidity factor) that you could use to pickle a cucumber," Trent said.
"We called the program MONSTER, for Multi-cellular Organisms Not Seen by Traditional Environmental Research," Trent explained to laughs.
The field is also gaining respect at NASA and, its proponents hope, worldwide.
NASA Administrator Dan Goldin is "a huge fan of astrobiology," Clark said, leaning forward and rolling her eyes for emphasis.
The head of the Institute himself just recently became interested. Blumberg, in his seventies, won a Nobel Prize in 1976 for his discovery of the virus causing Hepatitis B and his creation of a vaccine. He said he attended a NASA workshop a year ago that "kind of opened my eyes to it."
"I'd never even read much science fiction," Blumberg said with a smile, "But I'm reading more now. I'm not even the "Star Trek" generation."
Blumberg said he hopes to bring the field "to the attention of the general scientific community."
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