Chemical Guidance in the Search for Past and Extant Life on Mars

NASA should design missions to Mars for the purpose of generating “Aha!” discoveries to jolt scientists contemplating the molecular origins of life.

These missions should be designed with an understanding of the privileged chemistry that likely created RNA prebiotically on Earth, and universal chemical principles that constrain the structure of Darwinian molecules generally.

Comments: White paper submitted in response to the call fromthe National Academy of Science for community input for the Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032

Steven A. Benner, Elisa Biondi, Hyo-Joong Kim, Jan Špaček
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2009.00723 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2009.00723v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
Submission history
From: Steven Benner
[v1] Tue, 1 Sep 2020 21:42:32 UTC (92 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00723
Astrobiology