Extreme conditions such as low temperature, dryness, and constant UV-radiation in terrestrial Antarctica are limiting factors to the survival of microbial populations. The objective of this study was to investigate the microbial diversity and enumeration between the open water lakes of Schirmacher Oasis and the permanently ice-covered Lake Untersee...
Extreme conditions such as low temperature, aridness, low availability of organic matter, high salinity and UV-radiation in terrestrial Antarctica are key factors limiting the habitation of biotic communities and ecosystem dynamics. In recent studies, it has been discovered that the bacterial communities are highly diverse and distributed widely in...
The Viking mission was the only mission to date that conducted life detection experiments. It revealed ambiguous and still controversial results. New findings and hypotheses urge a re-evaluation of the Viking results and a re-evaluation of the evidence for the possible presence of life on Mars in general. Recent findings of abundant water ice on Ma...
Geomorphic evidence suggests that recent gullies on Mars were formed by fluvial activity. The Martian gully features are significant because their existence implies the presence of liquid water near the surface on Mars in geologically recent times. Irrespective of the ultimate source of the fluid carving the gullies, we seek to understand the behav...
Published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets
Perennial springs located on west central Axel Heiberg Island in the Canadian High Arctic occur in a region with a mean annual air temperature of-17 degrees C and flow through continuous permafrost over 600 meters thick. The spring water is a low temperature (up to 6 degrees C) brine flow that maintains constant discharge temperatures and flow rate...
In the Fall of 1993, NASA Ames deployed a modified Phantom S2 Remotely- Operated underwater Vehicle (ROV) into an ice-covered sea environment near McMurdo Science Station, Antarctica. This deployment was part of the antarctic Space Analog Program, a joint program between NASA and the National Science Foundation to demonstrate technologies relevant ...
The goal of NASA s Exobiology Program is to understand the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. To do this, the Exobiology Program seeks to provide a critical framework and some key research to allow NASA to bear the combined talents and capabilities of the agency and the scientific community, and the unique opportunities af...
This symposium was held at the NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, July 24-27, 1990. The NASA exobiology investigators reported their recent research findings. Scientific papers were presented in the following areas: cosmic evolution of biogenic compounds, prebiotic evolution (planetary and molecular), early evolution of life (bio...
The feasibility of using Antarctica as a platform for creating earth-based simulations of regenerative life support systems (LSSs) for future space missions is discussed. The requirements for a bioregenerative LSS and the types of technologies that may be used in such a system are examined. Special attention is given to the objectives and the organ...
Descriptions of several instrument concepts that were generated during a workshop entitled, Exobiology Instrument Concepts for a Soviet Mars 94/94 Mission, held at NASA Ames Research Center in 1989 are presented. The objective was to define and describe instrument concepts for exobiology and related science that would be compatible with the mission...
This report has discussed the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) and the US Antarctic Program (USAP) in the context of assessing the potential rationale and strategy for conducting a cooperative NASA/NSF (National Science Foundation) effort. Specifically, such an effort would address shared research and data on living and conducting scientific rese...
