Together, they could revolutionize our knowledge of the red planet and extraterrestrial life.
Astronomers said Thursday the two planets could provide clues to how planetary systems are formed, and aid the search for extraterrestrial life.
The larger plan is to prepare for the search for extraterrestrial life by looking for things that live in extreme conditions on Earth.
MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- The European Space Agency got a head start Monday in sending probes to Mars to look for extraterrestrial life.
For the phoenix is also a good metaphor for the attitude of those who seek extraterrestrial life: a fire of optimism unquenchable by negative results.
Pretty soon, the hunt for extraterrestrial life, the development of self-driving cars, and the folding of enzymes into novel proteins were being done this way.
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Over the decades enthusiasm about extraterrestrial life has waxed and waned.
The link between the search for extraterrestrial life and our Earth-based problems is not surprising, because fundamentally it is all the same thing -- understanding how life, whether us or microbes, can be sustained in the cosmos.
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The ocean on Earth is thought to have been where life started, so these discoveries have led optimists to wonder whether the moons of Jupiter, rather than the deserts of Mars, may yield the first signs of extraterrestrial life.
And while out in the San Francisco Bay Area, we swing by the SETI institute to find out how the organization is actively looking for extraterrestrial life in the universe, including a discussion with SETI founder and developer of the Drake Equation, Frank Drake.
This unlikely sounding collaboration is taking place between researchers interested in exploring Lake Vostok in Antarctica, which is sealed off below several kilometres of ice, and planetary scientists, who see such exploration as a possible dress rehearsal for a future robotic mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, whose icy surface is thought to conceal vast oceans that might harbour extraterrestrial life.
The list of top discoveries made with Hubble reads like the hit parade of astronomy: a mysterious new "dark energy" causing the accelerating expansion of the universe, distances to other galaxies, the supermassive black holes at their centers, the age of the universe, planet formation around other stars, searches for signs of extraterrestrial life -- and the list goes on.
Perhaps the most famous effort in the hunt for alien life is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti), once funded in part by US space agency Nasa, which continues to listen to and look around the cosmos for signs of intelligent civilisations elsewhere.
Scientists don't have any other examples of extraterrestrial environments with this distinction of having been able to support life.
"The US government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race, " wrote space policy expert Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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