Download the latest NExSS Newsletter here!
https://nexss.info/newsletters/winter-2022-nexss-newsletter/
The NfoLD/NExSS Standards of Evidence for Life Detection Community Workshop
The NFoLD and NExSS research coordination networks hosted a joint virtual workshop on biosignature standards of evidence and reporting protocols from July 19-22, 2021. The workshop included 3 working days of discussion, and 1 break day during this time frame. Workshop attendees discussed the process needed to increase scientific confidence in biosignature detections, and how to best convey this continuum of confidence to a broader audience. The workshop also initiated a discussion on community biosignature detection reporting protocols.
The overall goal of the workshop was to produce community guidelines for biosignature detection. These ideas were then written up and will be submitted for publication. Here is the community report from the Biosignatures Standards of Evidence Workshop. Biosignatures_SoE_Workshop_July2021_Community_Report
The videos from this workshop are now available on a playlist from NASA Astrobiology. You may access the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2vV9BqKn2zc04s996jIyoEYGP5o8eAMz
NExSS Webinar on Habitability and Biosignatures April 28 2020
The webinar recording is now available. Please click here to access the recording.
On April 28, the NExSS webinar series continued with Adrian Lenardic (Rice University) and Hilairy Hartnett (SESE/ASU) discussing habitability and biosignatures.
Prof. Adrian Lenardic led a metacognitive discussion on what habitability is and how we might measure it using Earth and Venus as framing devices. In bulk properties such as size and distance from the host star, Earth and Venus are similar, yet one is habitable and the other decidedly not. Modelers can use these differences to categorize planets into regimes, a technique common in planetary science. But, Dr. Lenardic says, “they can misinform us about what habitability really is.”
Prof. Hilairy Hartnett presented the importance of phosphorus in biological processes, and discussed what phosphorus means in the context of searching for biosignatures on water worlds. Life on Earth heavily relies on carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus, and it turns out phosphorus is the limiting factor in searching for potentially habitable systems. Too much water is a potential problem for detecting life on an exoplanet because this limits the introduction of phosphorus to the environment, dropping oxygen production rates to abiotic levels, so we do not recognize the planet as habitable.