A few days ago we got a very exciting news: Our Alien Earths team was selected by NASA for a major award within its ICAR (Interdisciplinary Consortium for Astrobiology Research) program! The $6M funding awarded to our Alien Earths team will enable a very exciting and cutting-edge portfolio of research projects for the next five years.
Read the NASA Press Release and the UArizona Press Release!
Our work will build on the major results reached by our Other Earths team on the formation of habitable planets – and will apply that knowledge to nearby planetary systems to explore which are most likely to host habitable worlds. Alien Earths is going to be a very exciting, major research project but, even more than that, it will inform and guide next-generation NASA space telescope concepts to aid our search for habitable worlds and life in the Universe.
Our Alien Earths team will be part of the ICAR’s program’s NExSS research network, which focuses on exoplanet habitability, and we will also be part of the ICAR Astrobiology consortium. Very excitingly, our Alien Earths team was not the only UArizona-led teams to be selected by ICAR: the MUSE team, led by Prof. Betul Kacar, will also receive funding to study how and why natural selection selected for the specific metals used in terrestrial life.
The NASA grant to our Alien Earths team will allow us to support many undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior/senior scientists.