UKSA: Aurora Science Announcement of Opportunity
The UK Space Agency is making funding available for Aurora science. The purpose of this AO is to support science associated with planetary exploration to enhance the UK’s capabilities and cross-disciplinary approach to planetary science. The scientific objectives of the first mission in the Aurora programme, ExoMars, are to target the questions of past and present life on Mars, investigating the presence of water and the geochemical environment as well as atmospheric trace gases and their sources. The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter was successfully launched in March 2016 and will reach Mars in...
Read MoreNew Conversation Articles
Explore the links below for the latest in-depth articles from The Conversation on a diverse range of astrobiological topics. This latest roundup explores the question of whether Alpha Centauri is the right place to search for life elsewhere, the topic of bacteria in space, and the role of ‘stellar weather’ in the search for life. Is Alpha Centauri the right place to search for life elsewhere? Bacteria found to thrive better in space than on Earth What the ‘weather’ is like on a star can help in the search for life
Read More‘Planetary Sciences’ by Imke de Pater & Jack J. Lissauer, Cambridge University Press (2015)
By its very nature, astrobiology is an interdisciplinary field. To the undergraduate coming directly from a background almost exclusively in biology, the sudden influx of planetary science knowledge required can be overwhelming. As a result, a work like Imke de Pater and Jack J. Lissauer’s Planetary Sciences is invaluable. While the incredible number of graphs, charts and formulae filling the book can at first appear daunting, the text is written at an undergraduate level and is easy to understand for those with no formal training in the planetary sciences. Covering an impressively wide...
Read More‘Astrobiology: Understanding Life in the Universe’ by Charles S. Cockell
As far as textbooks go, a tome on astrobiology is a peculiarly difficult beast to get right. The interdisciplinary science of astrobiology is very broad, reaching across many different fields, and so not only does a textbook need to balance this breadth of diverse subject matter with the meaningful depth of coverage of each topic, but it also has to be comprehensible for students from very different backgrounds. Yet Cockell pulls this trick off admirably well in this latest textbook introducing the field. ‘Astrobiology: Understanding Life in the Universe’ is based on...
Read MoreEANA & AbGradE 2016
The European Astrobiology Network Association (EANA) 2016 meeting will be held in Athens on 27th-30th September. Sessions will include talks on any astrobiological discipline. An optional field trip to Milos Island will take place after the conference (if there is sufficient interest). Registration and abstract submission deadline: 31st July. More information can be found here: http://www.astrobiology.gr/eana16/ The 2016 AbGradE (Astrobiology Graduates in Europe) Symposium 2016 will be held directly before EANA 2016 in Athens between 25th-27th September. AbGradE is an independent association...
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