Searching for Extant Life on Mars: What's Next?
Abstract
From Nov. 5th -8th, 2019 we conducted the conference "Mars Extant Life: What's Next?" in Carlsbad, NM. This three-and-one-half-day conference focused on understanding and discussing strategies for exploring for extant life on Mars. Inspired by the important conference, Biosignature Preservation and Detection in Mars Analog Environments (May 16-18, 2016; Lake Tahoe) that addressed the search for ancient life, this conference promoted broad community discussion of the numerous extant life hypotheses that have been advanced over the years and that have evolved in response to discoveries by on-going Mars missions.
The conference was set-up to provide time for group discussion after each session. In order to allow for deeper penetration into each subject area, and to help set-up for writing the conference report, the conference participants were broken up into smaller groups of ~6-7 people for more in-depth discussion. Each small group was asked to prepare 3-4 viewgraphs on a specific topic to present on the last day of the conference. This was followed up by further discussion amongst the whole group. All of this was then synthesized into the conference report. Primary Scientific Questions Addressed The conference program was designed to generate information related to the following major themes: Which candidate environmental niches on Mars are hypothesized to host extant martian life? Which types of measurements are necessary to test these hypotheses? Which kinds of present and future missions, including the associated instrumentation, could contribute to the search for evidence of extant life? Effort was put into documenting the primary conclusions, strategies, and open questions developed at the conference. Our intent is to develop the workshop report into a short publication to be submitted to one of the relevant technical journals, which could be used to convey the essential messages from the conference, and to allow for a broadening of the key discussion points to scientists who were unable to attend.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.P21E3419C
- Keywords:
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- 0406 Astrobiology and extraterrestrial materials;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0452 Instruments and techniques;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0456 Life in extreme environments;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES