Lecture looks at search for Martian life

Lecture looks at search for Martian life
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How to search
for life on Mars is the subject of a Nov. 4 lecture by University
of Southern California Geobiologist Kenneth Nealson. Nealson
will give a presentation titled “Geobiology as a Guidepost
for the Search for Life on Mars” as part of this fall’s
Wiess School of Natural Sciences Dean’s Lecture Series.
The lecture will begin at 4 p.m. in the Chemistry Lecture
Hall in Howard Keck Hall.

Nealson’s
lecture derives from a decades-long program that NASA is
undertaking to explore Mars. Part of that mission involves
searching for life, but life on the red planet may be far
different from that on Earth. Nealson said insight into
the interactions of the geosphere and biosphere on Earth
have helped define a strategy to search for life on Mars.

Nealson will
describe this strategy, which uses image analysis to search
for complex chemical structures and disequilibria that can
be explained only by the rapid catalysis characteristic
of living systems.