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Looking Back At Earth: LCROSS Spacecraft Detects Life On The Blue Planet
- chanux 17y agoSo now it's confirmed: Life on earth :)
- fhars 17y agoWhile this may sound silly (NASA detects life of earth!) it is actually a nontrivial feat to detect the presence of life on a planet if you are sufficiently far away from it. So the fact that they were able to detect signs of life from about as far away as the moon is an interesting datapoint for the sensitivity of the instruments on board. This is the kind of calibration you should do if you want to study other planets.
- spyrosk 17y agoDuring the Earth observations, the spacecraft's spectrometers were able to detect the signatures of the Earth's water, ozone, methane, oxygen, carbon dioxide and possibly vegetation. I'm sorry but I don't get how they detected life on Earth. I can accept/imagine a few ways for tracing various chemicals/elements on a planet's surface and atmosphere from space but how can one detect life? Not only that but the reporter says "and possibly vegetation". So their results aren't conclusive?
- asmithmd1 17y agoThe mission has a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/LCROSS-Lunar-Impactor-Mission/154478180006 http://www.facebook.com/pages/LCROSS-Lunar-Impactor-Mission/... Hasn't anyone told NASA that Facebook is so last season? The probe should be Twittering.
- andrewf 17y agoIt does. In first person groan http://twitter.com/Lcross_Nasa http://twitter.com/Lcross_Nasa