When Aomawa Shields temporarily left astronomy in the 1990s for a life in the theater, no one knew whether planets existed beyond our solar system. By the time she returned to academia 11 years later, hundreds of exoplanets had been discovered. Today, telescopes and detection methods have advanced so much that the discoveries number close to 6,000. Shields, now an astrobiologist at UC Irvine, studies these distant worlds using computer models to evaluate their climates and assess whether they might be friendly to alien life. During this second stint in academia, she completed her PhD at age 39 and afterward gave birth to her daughter.

Let me tell you what it's like to be an astrobiologist. I painted a white picket fence this summer. It was a task I'd set myself without realizing what a long-winded and frustrating process it would be. But eventually that endless scraping, priming, painting, and maneuvering settled into something therapeutic, even meditative. I'd paint the apex--dab, dab--run down the narrow sides, coat the smooth front, shuffle along, repeat. All the while acutely aware of being surrounded by the churn of summer in the northern hemisphere of a living planet.

Artificial intelligence could aid in the search for life on alien planets and detection of nearby asteroids, according to NASA officials. NASA hopes to use artificial intelligence, or A.I., technologies such as machine learning to interpret data that will be collected by future telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, according to a statement from the space agency. "These technologies are very important, especially for big data sets and especially in the exoplanet field," Giada Arney, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "Because the data we're going to get from future observations is going to be sparse and noisy. It's going to be really hard to understand. So using these kinds of tools has so much potential to help us."

Humans have a '50/50' chance of finding life on the red planet within three years, according to an astrobiologist working on the next Mars rover. The ExoMars rover is scheduled to land on the red planet in August 2021 and will be part of a mission to investigate how the planet evolved and whether it has conditions for life. Scientists working on the project believe plans to excavate below the surface of the red planet greatly increase their chance of finding life. Humans have a '50/50' chance of finding life on the red planet within three years, according to an astrobiologist working on the next Mars rover (artist's impression) Due to launch in 2020, the ExoMars rover will be the first of its kind to travel across the martian surface and drill-down to determine if evidence of life is buried underground. Dr Susanne Schwenzer, the astrobiologist on the ExoMars rover told the Daily Telegraph that the'chances are just about 50/50'.

The researchers at NASA's Frontier Development Lab (FDL) in Mountain View California just spent the summer working on out-of-this-world problems. They came from all over the globe and all different disciplines; computer science engineers, planetary scientists, even a particle physicist. For eight weeks they dug through data and maps, created worlds and atmospheres, sorted them, and tested their computer algorithms against the simulations. Their final products are still rough, but some hope they might contribute to our understanding of our own solar system, and overall efforts to find habitable--and maybe even inhabited--planets elsewhere in the universe. The FDL program itself is now in its third year.

A NASA robot has found more building blocks for life on Mars, the most complex organic matter yet from 3.5 billion-year-old rocks on the surface of the red planet, the US space agency said on Thursday. The unmanned Curiosity rover has also found increasing evidence for seasonal variations of methane on Mars, indicating the source of the gas is likely the planet itself, or possibly its subsurface water. The data, collected through drilling into the lowest point of the red planet's Gale crater, is part of the US space agency's newly widened search for organic molecules that could indicate past life on the surface of Mars. Additional data from the robotic probe confirms the detection of "seasonal patterns" in methane levels, NASA geophysicist Ashwin Vasvada said in the live-streamed announcement. NASA scientist Chris Webster confirmed that water has been found on the martian surface and has been present for "a very long time," which points strongly toward a "habitable environment".