Welcome to Penn State Astrobiology Research Center. The Center is part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI).
A major research focus of astrobiology is enabling the recognition of signatures of life on the early Earth, in extreme environments, and in extraterrestrial settings. Our team will develop novel approaches to detecting and characterizing life, investigate biosignatures in mission-relevant ecosystems and ancient rock and evaluate the potential for biosignatures in extraterrestrial settings.
PSARC Mission
Developing New Biosignatures
Our efforts will focus on creating innovative approaches for the analyses of cells and other organic material, finding ways in which metal abundances and isotope systems reflect life, and developing creative approaches for using environmental DNA to study present and past life.
Biosignatures in Ancient Rocks
The Earth’s Archean and Proterozoic eons offer the best opportunity for investigating a microbial world, such as might be found elsewhere in the cosmos. The ancient record on Earth provides an opportunity to see what geochemical signatures are produced by microbial life and how these signatures are preserved over geologic time.
Biosignatures in Relevant Microbial Ecosystems
We will investigate microbial life in some of Earth’s most mission-relevant ecosystems: the Dead Sea, the Chesapeake impact structure, the methane seeps of the Eel River Basin, and Greenland glacier ice.
Biosignatures in Extraterrestrial Settings
We will investigate the abundance of sulfur gases and elucidate how these gases can be expected to evolve with time on young terrestrial planets. We will continue studies of planet formation in the presence of migration and model radial transport of volatiles in young planetary systems, and will also be involved with searches for M star planetary companions and planets around K-giant stars.
Latest News
Brantley Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
Susan L. Brantley was elected to the National Academy of Sciences on May 1, 2012. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific research and dedicated to advancing science and technology for the public good. Members are elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research, and it is arguably the highest honor that a U.S. scientist can receive. The nation's leaders in Congress and the White House often turn to the Academy for advice on scientific issues that often affect policy decisions. See (website) for more information.
Rise of Atmospheric Oxygen More Complicated Than Previously Thought
The appearance of oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere probably did not occur as a single event, but as a long series of starts and stops, according to geoscientists who investigated rock cores from the FAR DEEP project.
The Fennoscandia Arctic Russia - Drilling Early Earth Project--FAR DEEP--took place during the summer of 2007 near Murmansk in Northwest Russia.
The project, part of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program, drilled a series of shallow, two-inch diameter cores and, by overlapping them, created a record of stone deposited during the Proterozoic Eon--2,500 million to 542 million years ago.
"We've always thought that oxygen came into the atmosphere really quickly during an event," said Lee Kump, a geoscientist at Penn State University.
"We are no longer looking for an event. Now we're looking for when and why oxygen became a stable part of the Earth's atmosphere."
The researchers report in the December 1 issue of the journal Science Express that evaluation of these cores, in comparison with cores from Gabon previously analyzed by others, supports the conclusion that the Great Oxidation Event, the appearance of free oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, played out over hundreds of millions of years. Kump is the lead author of the Science Express paper.
For more information, see here
