Holy cow!It may have been living in the shadow of its younger sibling Perseverance for the last few months, but NASA’s Curiosity rover has just provided evidence of a key ingredient for life on Mars.

Scientists using NASA’s Curiosity rover measured the total organic carbon – a key component in the molecules of life – in Martian rocks for the first time.

Worlds that hold onto their dense primordial atmospheres of hydrogen and helium may stay warm enough to maintain liquid water on their surfaces, even without starlight.

China’s first Mars mission will search for pockets of water beneath the surface that could host life.

As China’s first Mars mission, is uniquely ambitious. No nation had ever attempted to send an orbiter and rover to Mars on the first try. But China succeeded, making a historic victory.

Tianwen-1 arrived in Mars orbit as a single spacecraft. Once on Mars, the landing platform extended a ramp, allowing the Zhurong rover to roll gently onto the surface—similar to the way China’s Chang’e Moon rovers are deployed.

When did the Zhurong rover land on Mars?

Zhurong successfully landed on the Red Planet on May 14. The rover touched down on Utopia Planitia—the vast Martian plain where NASA’s Viking 2 spacecraft landed in the 1970s, and the site of a shipbuilding yard in the Star Trek universe.

Exploring Otherness on Earth and Beyond is a new research project of ours with the goal to prepare us for the discovery of alien life. For more info, see.

The possibility also remains that if aliens are sending us, or unintentionally leaking, signals across the vast expanse of the cosmos, they may not be encoded in radio waves, but in ways that we haven’t yet developed the technology to understand.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if we were on the wrong track. If you look at the history of SETI, the original ideas proposed around 200 years ago were things like ‘let’s build some big fires on Earth’; ‘let’s have some big mirrors that reflect sunlight to the Martians’ or ‘let’s build some mile-long right-angled triangles to show aliens we know about Pythagorean Theorem,’ and now we look back and say those guys were idiots,” Werthimer said. “So, what’s to say that 200 years from now people won’t look back at us and ask why we didn’t use tachyons or subspace communication? But you’ve got to do what you know how to do.”

Despite the dispiriting likelihood that these signals have an Earthbound source, SETI astronomers are still fairly confident that we’re not alone in the universe. And that one day, we may dig up something real amid all of our own backchatter.

The narrow-band electromagnetic signals detected by Sky Eye — the world’s largest radio telescope — differ from previous ones captured and the team is further investigating them, the report said, citing Zhang Tonjie, chief scientist of an extraterrestrial civilization search team co-founded by Beijing Normal University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of California, Berkeley.

It isn’t clear why the report was apparently removed from the website of the Science and Technology Daily, the official newspaper of China’s science and technology ministry, though the news had already started trending on social network Weibo and was picked up by other media outlets, including state-run ones.

In September 2020, Sky Eye, which is located in China’s southwestern Guizhou province and has a diameter of 500 meters (1,640 feet), officially launched a search for extraterrestrial life. The team detected two sets of suspicious signals in 2020 while processing data collected in 2019, and found another suspicious signal in 2022 from observation data of exoplanet targets, Zhang said, according to the report.

China said its giant Sky Eye telescope may have picked up signs of alien civilizations, according to a report by the state-backed Science and Technology Daily, which then appeared to have deleted the report and posts about the discovery.