A primitive ocean on Mars once held more water than Earth's Arctic Ocean, according to NASA scientists who measured signatures of water in the planet's atmosphere using the most powerful telescopes on Earth including the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii.
We report new laboratory studies of the radiation-induced destruction of glycine-containing ices for a range of temperatures and compositions that allow extrapolation to Martian conditions.
A research team led by LSU Geology and Geophysics Assistant Professor Suniti Karunatillake reveals a spatial association between the presence of sulfur and hydrogen found in martian soil.
Old Dominion University faculty member Nora Noffke has made a name for herself as a geobiologist during the past decade by producing sedimentary evidence that prokaryote biofilms existed on Earth billions of years ago.
A new analysis of a Martian rock that meteorite hunters plucked from an Antarctic ice field 30 years ago this month reveals a record of the planet's climate billions of years ago, back when water likely washed across its surface and any life that ever formed there might have emerged.
NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has measured a tenfold spike in methane, an organic chemical, in the atmosphere around it and detected other organic molecules in a rock-powder sample collected by the robotic laboratory's drill.
In 2012 the Mars Science Laboratory landed in the fascinating Gale crater. The Gale crater is of such great interest because of the 5.5 km high mountain of layered materials in the middle.
How habitable was Mars in the past? Since the Curiosity rover touched down on Mars in August 2012, it has helped answer a few of these questions in the area surrounding its equatorial landing site of Gale Crater.
Like surgeons in an operating room, the technicians work gowned and masked in ESA's ultraclean microbiology laboratory, ensuring a high-tech sensor will not contaminate the Red Planet with terrestrial microbes.
The finding of a 'cell-like' structure, which investigators now know once held water, came about as a result of collaboration between scientists in the UK and Greece. Their findings are published in the latest edition of the journal Astrobiology.
Heat from a volcano erupting beneath an immense glacier would have created large lakes of liquid water on Mars in the relatively recent past.
The presence of valleys on ancient terrains of Mars suggest that liquid water flowed on the martian surface 3.8 billion years ago or before.
Scientists have discovered that the earliest living organisms on Earth were capable of making a mineral that may be found on Mars.
Geologists who analyzed 40 meteorites that fell to Earth from Mars unlocked secrets of the Martian atmosphere hidden in the chemical signatures of these ancient rocks.
Astrobiologists supported by the Exobiology element of NASA's Astrobiology Program have provided new information about the survival of biosignatures on Mars. Their study also provides new insight into data from a NASA mission that was sent to the red planet almost 40 years ago.
This week, twenty European scientists will gather at Boulby mine in the UK to begin testing technologies for the exploration of Mars and hunting for deep subsurface life that will aid scientists in their search for extraterrestrial life.
A research team in Spain has the enviable job of testing out new electromechanical gear for potential use in future missions to the "Red Planet."
When we send probes to other worlds (such as Mars) to look for evidence of past life, we are sending them to look for fossils.
A team of scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has found evidence of past water movement throughout a Martian meteorite, reviving debate in the scientific community over life on Mars.
Mysterious dark finger-like features on steep Martian slopes that lengthen downhill during the Red Planet's warm season could be caused by flowing water, scientists at Southwest Research Institute and the SETI Institute reported.