NASA Wants to Compile a Catalog of the Fingerprints of Life

By Alan Boyle - MSNBC

WASHINGTON _ Looking ahead to the next millennium, NASA's chief on Wednesday emphasized the search for extraterrestrial life as a top goal and took astronomers to task for lacking formal training in biology. As part of the "new unifying approach to biology within the agency," NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said he would set up an electronic Virtual Astrobiology Institute.

MIDWAY INTO his address to the American Astronomical Society on the future strategy for the space agency's involvement in scientific investigation, Goldin asked all those who had formal academic training in biology to raise their hands.

"Is this the group that's going to search for life? I think I counted two or three hands," the former aerospace executive said.

"This is a serious problem," he said. "The leadership of NASA, the leadership of the scientific community, is saying we're going to develop platforms that cost hundreds of billions of dollars, yet we don't have a biologist in the house to help us define what the requirements for the science might be."

Afterward, several astronomers said they didn't take Goldin's comments as a personal rebuke, but as a reflection of changes in the nation's scientific agenda.

"We all have our different disciplines," said Richard Rand of the University of New Mexico's Institute for Astrophysics, whose research focuses on the nature of interstellar matter. "The biologists would probably have the same problem with astronomy."

NASA'S HOLY GRAIL George Withroe, head of NASA's Sun-Earth Connections program, said the search for life on other heavenly bodies has become a "Holy Grail" and a unifying theme for the space agency's research.

"If we find it, it'll be like the `Earthrise' picture," Withroe said, referring to the famous Apollo image of Earth floating in space above the moon's horizon.

Goldin invoked more recent glories in his call to focus on space biology: The Mars Pathfinder and Global Surveyor missions, for example, found evidence that the Red Planet was once warmer, wetter and much more Earthlike. A Martian meteorite found in Antarctica contained microscopic traces of structures some believe might be fossilized life forms. Meanwhile, data from the Galileo probe hinted that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, had a liquid water ocean beneath its crust of ice.

Goldin hailed the Hubble Space Telescope's repair as "one of the most remarkable turnarounds in the history of the agency," and said future space-based observing instruments will yield even more information about distant planetary systems.

"We must look for planets more similar to Earth," he said.

ROBOTIC MISSIONS TO EUROPA, PLUTO Goldin noted several other future robotic missions, including the plan to send an orbiter to Europa and a deep space probe to Pluto and beyond in the next decade. To follow up on the success of the Mars landers and orbiters, NASA is planning a 2005 mission aimed at returning a sample of Martian rocks and soil to Earth. Goldin said NASA was hoping to put together a second sample-return mission in cooperation with French officials, perhaps using the Ariane rocket used for European launches.

He told MSNBC that the plan for the Virtual Astrobiology Institute, which would apparently use the Internet to put biologists, chemists and physicists in touch with each other, was still in the formative stage. "We need a catalog of detectable characteristics of extraterrestrial biospheres _ a catalog of fingerprints for life," he told the astronomers.

He also trumpeted research into such frontiers of space science as gamma-ray bursts, the origins of the universe and breakthrough propulsion technologies. He hoped propulsion techniques would reach a level that would enable robotic explorers to be sent to the most promising planetary candidates beyond our solar system, sending back data within just a few human generations.

"What an incredible way it would be to close the 21st century, to have a spacecraft approaching a rendezvous with another planetary system," he said.

FASTER, CHEAPER, BETTER ROBOTS In keeping with NASA's push for "faster, cheaper, better" space exploration, Goldin said future space robots had to become smaller and easier to mass-produce, drawing an analogy to the personal computer revolution. Although Golden waxed eloquently on the marvels of robotic exploration, he specifically reserved any comment about human space flight, saying that subject would be reserved for another speech.

Thus, there was no mention of the megabillion-dollar International Space Station, the agency's costliest and most controversial program. But NASA's Withroe said later that the space station, which will be constructed in orbit beginning this summer, would serve as a test bed for future human missions to Mars and elsewhere. "Why limit ourselves to just one planet?" he said, referring to Earth.