The Color Green-Part II
”This work broadens our understanding of how life may be detected on Earth-like planets around other stars, while simultaneously improving our understanding of life on Earth,” said Carl Pilcher, director of the NAI at NASA Ames. “This approach — studying Earth life to guide our search for life on other worlds — is the essence of astrobiology.”
During the process of photosynthesis, the chlorophyll in plants has the ability to absorb more blue and red light from sunlight, with less green light being absorbed. Chlorophyll is green in color. Why? Because it reflects green light more than blue and red light. NASA has the ability to now identify the “strongest candidate wavelengths of light for a dominant color of photosynthesis on another planet,” said Nancy Kiang, lead author of the study and a biometeorologist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York.
The study with Kiang involves a team of scientists at the Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VLP) at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA. The VLP was originally formed as part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI) based at the NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Kiang and her team calculated what the stellar light would be like visually at the surface of Earth-like planets. What plays a major part in this is if the atmospheric chemistry is consistent with the different types of stars they orbit, according to NASA. What is theorized is that each planet, based on the planet’s atmosphere where the most light will reach the planet’s surface, will have dominant colors for photosynthesis. NASA feels that the dominant photosynthesis may even be in the infrared. The team is using a suite of computer models to simulate the Earth-size planets and their light spectra, as space telescopes would see them.
NAI, or the NASA Astrobiology Institute, has 16 Lead Teams with over 700 investigators across the United States, with international partnerships with astrobiology research organizations around the world. These teams are supported by NASA, through 5-year cooperative agreements with NASA Ames Research Center under three competitive review cycles. Some teams in the active stage now are: University of Colorado, Boulder; NASA Ames Research Center; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; SETI Institute, among others. At the same time, the Virtual Planetary Laboratory in California, in addition to Kiangs work, is working on simulations of an increasingly frozen Mars, with other research highlights including completion of the Mars and Earth models.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 8:24 am and is filed under Mission Objectives, Technical Concerns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
