An Astrobiology Strategy for the Search for Life in the Universe (2019) / Chapter Skim
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Simultaneously, programmatic advances -- for example, the creation of research coordination networks -- have begun to break down traditional disciplinary boundaries and resulted in greater communication across the broad fields of astrobiological research. Against the backdrop of these changes, increasing public interest in astrobiology, and the approaching decadal surveys in astronomy and astrophysics and planetary sciences, which will guide agency scientific priorities for the coming decade, NASA's request for this assessment of advances and future directions in the field of astrobiology is timely.
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Although the research for these basic questions is most easily carried out on Earth, the far-reaching questions to be addressed in the next two decades demonstrate that dynamic habitability and the coevolution of planets and life provide a powerful comparative foundation upon which to integrate diverse astrobiology communities focusing on Earth, the solar system, stellar astronomy, and exoplanetary systems. Recommendation: NASA and other relevant agencies should catalyze research focused on emerging systems-level thinking about dynamic habitability and the coevolution of planets and life, with a focus on problems and not disciplines -- that is, using and expanding successful programmatic mechanisms that foster interdisciplinary and cross-divisional collaboration.
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Some of the Kepler planets fall within what is commonly considered the "habitable zone" -- traditionally defined as that region around a star where an Earth-like exoplanet could support liquid water on its surface -- of their host star. This discovery, coupled with estimates of the fraction of stars with rocky, habitablezone planets, has matured the search for evidence of life beyond the solar system enough to warrant taking the next steps toward the discovery of life on exoplanets.
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The identification of novel and agnostic biosignatures focuses on both in situ biosignature detection and remotely sensed biosignatures. Remotely sensed agnostic biosignatures may take the form of complex chemical networks in planetary atmospheres or atmospheric disequilibria.
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Such biosignatures occur at the microscale, and new technologies for microscale and nanoscale analyses combining optical microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, laserinduced breakdown spectroscopy, infrared, and other interrogatory methods offer promise for advancing detection of and confidence in biosignature interpretation. Over the next two decades, the foregoing lines of research will converge to give a clearer picture of preservational biases for biosignatures, how these may result in false negatives, and which biosignatures have the highest probability for preservation and detection, and on what timescales preservation is possible or probable.
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Current NASA instrument evaluation and selection policies tend to favor low risk technologies, which in some cases adversely impacts scientific payoff. This inhibits development and selection of potentially gamechanging life detection technologies.
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The nucleation of government-level astrobiological partnerships that has been initiated by NASA could have the potential to motivate formation of an international organization with a unified focus on solving the immense challenges of detecting and confirming evidence for life within and beyond the solar system. One possible example discussed by the committee would be the establishment of a new international organization dedicated to the goal of supporting the development, construction, and operation of a direct-imaging space telescope capable of searching hundreds of nearby stars for possibly habitable exoEarths.
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