Origins and Development of NASA's Exobiology Program, 1958-1976
- Paper number
IAC-06-E4.2.03
- Author
Dr. Steven Dick, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/Headquarters, United States
- Year
2006
- Abstract
Following NASA's founding in 1958, the American space agency was quick to embrace exobiology as an important goal. In July 1959 NASA's first Administrator, T. Keith Glennan, appointed a Bioscience Advisory Committee, which reported in January 1960 that NASA should not only be involved in space medicine, but also should undertake "investigations of the effects of extraterrestrial environments on living organisms including the search for extraterrestrial life." In the spring of 1960 NASA set up an Office of Life Sciences. By August, with the possibility of planetary missions on the horizon, it had authorized the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to study the type of spacecraft needed to land on Mars and search for life. In order to study chemical evolution, the conditions under which life might survive, and a variety of related issues, NASA's first life sciences lab was set up at its Ames Research Center in California in 1960. In 1962 the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences set the search for extraterrestrial life as "the prime goal of space biology." The search for life beyond Earth in many ways became a driver of the American space program, and these early events were the essential underpinnings that led to the landings of two Viking spacecraft on Mars in 1976. Although the funding and research that went into the Viking program contributed substantially to our knowledge of Mars, the landers failed unambiguously to find life, closing the first era of exobiology. Nevertheless, the exobiology program continued to fund cutting-edge research in origin of life studies and the biological sciences in general. Two decades after Viking, following the claims of fossils in the Mars rock ALH84001, the discipline was revitalized under the name 'astrobiology.'
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-06-E4.2.03.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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