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Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking Lander in Death Valley California. Viking 1 and 2 were the first spacecraft to search for present day life on Mars, indeed, the only spacecraft to ever search for life outside of Earth. But with new discoveries about the possibilities for liquid water both in microhabitats on Mars and the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus, and the ethane / methane seas of Titan this is a top priority for future missions.

Featured articles

Life on Mars:

• Possible present day habitats for life on Mars
• Protecting Mars special regions with potential for life to propagate
• News coverage of potential present day habitats of life on Mars
• Life on Mars
• Present day Mars habitability analogue environments on Earth
• Viking program
• Allan Hills 84001 - the meteorite with tiny structures resembling cells
• Sponges on Mars? We ask Stamenković about their oxygen-rich briny seeps model

Planetary protection:

• Planetary protection
• Interplanetary contamination
• Protecting Mars special regions with potential for life to propagate
• Planetary protection for a Mars sample return
• Mars sample return pages: MSR facility - Legal Issues - science value - Dissenting views on back contamination risks

Life elsewhere

• Terrestrial analogue sites

Remaining articles on this page are not vetted yet - just imported from Wikipedia and may be out of date or have significant errors.

• Hypothetical types of biochemistry
• Life on Titan
• Life on Venus

Astrobiology:

• Astrobiology
• Abiogenesis - about the natural process of how life arises from non living matter
• Panspermia - transfer of life between planets on meteorites.
• Murchison meteorite

List of articles that need to be vetted

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Astrobiology

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About this site

This encyclopedia is based on astrobiology articles imported from Wikipedia. You are welcome to join in and help edit it. We welcome those knowledgeable in astrobiology especially, and your expertise and knowledge will be respected here. The aim here is to have a small friendly wiki, where we work together, and know each other. Do introduce yourself, here New editors

Other wikis

These wikis are also developed from Wikipedia pages originally:

• Encyclopedia of Microtonality
• Encyclopedia of Buddhism - set up by Dorje108 with me as co-admin.
• Doomsday Debunked

For the background to why we set up new encyclopedias, instead of working on the pages in Wikipedia itself, see background to this encyclopedia. Also see my science blog post here:

• Why It's Easy To Improve On Wikipedia In Specialist Encyclopedias (Ours Are For Astrobiology, Microtonal Music, And Buddhism)