The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ at Boulder has been selected by NASA as one of 11 initial members of the space agency's new Astrobiology Institute that will focus on interdisciplinary research regarding life in the universe.
The 11 academic and research institutions were selected from 53 proposals submitted to NASA. CU-Boulder's new Center for Astrobiology, which will be headquartered at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics under the direction of LASP Research Associate Bruce Jakosky, will be funded by a five-year, $3 million NASA grant.
The new NASA institute will be "virtual" in the sense that all participating scientists and students will remain at their home organizations and collaborate electronically with each other, said Jakosky, who also is an associate professor in the geological sciences department. The new NASA initiative will allow scientists from multiple disciplines to work together on the complex issue of life in the universe and its implications.
"It's exciting to get in on the ground floor of what is rapidly becoming one of the centerpieces of NASA's science agenda -- the search for life," said Jakosky. NASA's Astrobiology Institute is a major component of the agency's Origins Program, which was developed by the Office of Space Science to search for signs of life both in and beyond our solar system.
The new CU-Boulder center will involve faculty and students in the departments of astrophysical and planetary sciences; geological sciences; environmental, population and organismic biology; molecular, cellular and developmental biology; and philosophy. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and faculty at LASP, the Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy and the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences also will be involved.
"These initial members of NASA's Astrobiology Institute will be at the forefront of the increasingly important link between astronomy and biology, which has been a fundamental interest of mine for the past several years," said NASA Administrator Dan Goldin in a statement. "The 'office hallways' of this virtual institute will be the fiber optic cables of the next generation Internet, and the groundbreaking research that this group generates will help guide our space exploration priorities well into the 21st century."
NASA funding for the institute will begin with $9 million in 1999 and $20 million in 2000. This total is expected to grow as research directions are developed and the capabilities of the next generation Internet are expanded.
CU-Boulder plans to hire two additional faculty members to support the initiative, Jakosky said. CU also will collaborate with the Southwest Research Institute's Boulder office and Lockheed-Martin of Denver.
"This project is particularly exciting because of the existing capabilities CU already has," said Jakosky. Research topics to be addressed by the NASA institute include the formation of organic compounds important to the origins of life, the formation and characteristics of habitable planets and the emergence of self-replicating systems and possible "prebiotic" worlds.
Other topics include how the Earth and life have influenced each other over time, the evolution of multicellular organisms, the adaptations of organisms living in extreme environments like hydrothermal vents and the development of criteria to determine extraterrestrial "biosignatures," said Jakosky, CU-Boulder's principal investigator on the project.
Other universities selected for participation were Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, Arizona State University and Pennsylvania State University. Research institutes involved include the Carnegie Institute in Washington D.C., Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.
Participating NASA centers include Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, Calif., Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.