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Searching for extraterrestrial life and supporting human life in space are traditionally regarded as separate challenges. However, there are significant benefits to an approach that treats them as different aspects of the same essential…
The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological…
Microorganisms hosted in abiotic structures have led to engineered living materials that can grow, sense and adapt in ways that mimic biological systems. Although porous structures should favor colonization by microorganisms, they have not…
Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around very low mass stars are likely to have evolved in a very different way than solar system planets, and in particular Earth. However, because these are the first planets that are and will be…
This paper describes some results of research on associate systems: knowledge-based systems that flexibly and adaptively support their human users in carrying out complex, time-dependent problem-solving tasks under uncertainty. Based on…
The composition of an atmosphere has integrated the geological history of the entire planetary body. However, the long-term evolutions of the atmospheres of the terrestrial planets are not well documented. For Earth, there were until…
Data assimilation is an increasingly popular technique in Mars atmospheric science, but its effect on the mean states of the underlying atmosphere models has not been thoroughly examined. The robustness of results to the choice of model and…
Habitability is a measure of an environment's potential to support life, and a habitable exoplanet supports liquid water on its surface. However, a planet's success in maintaining liquid water on its surface is the end result of a complex…
Many of the building blocks of life such as amino acids and nucleotides are chiral, i.e., different from their mirror image. Contemporary life selects and synthesizes only one of two possible handednesses. In an abiotic environment,…
Host-microbe interactions play crucial roles in marine ecosystems, but we still have very little understanding of the mechanisms that govern these relationships, the evolutionary processes that shape them, and their ecological consequences.…
The endeavor of interstellar exploration is a convergence of technical innovation and profound ethical inquiry, challenging humanity to extend its reach beyond the confines of our solar system while contemplating the moral implications of…
In the light of current scientific assessments of human-induced climate change, we investigate an experimental model to inform how resource-use strategies may influence interplanetary and interstellar colonisation by intelligent…
As humans venture deeper into space, the need for a lunar settlement, housing the first group of settlers, grows steadily. By means of new technologies such as in situ resource utilisation (ISRU) as well as computational design, this goal…
A challenge in global change biology is to predict how species will respond to future environmental change and to manage these responses. To make such predictions and management actions robust to novel futures, we need to accurately…
The field of exoplanetary science is making rapid progress both in statistical studies of exoplanet properties as well as in individual characterization. As space missions provide an emerging picture of formation and evolution of…
Energy balance models (EBMs), alongside radiative-convective climate models (RCMs) and global climate models (GCMs), are useful tools for simulating planetary climates. Historically, planetary and exoplanetary EBMs have solely been 1D…
The novel propellantless electric solar wind sail concept promises efficient low thrust transportation in the Solar System outside Earth's magnetosphere. Combined with asteroid mining to provide water and synthetic cryogenic rocket fuel in…
Some human mission trajectories to Mars include flybys of Venus. These flybys provide opportunities to practice deep space human operations, and offer numerous safe-return-to-Earth options, before committing to longer and lower-cadence…
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology is rapidly accelerating the pace of biological discovery and engineering. AI techniques, such as large language models and biological design tools, are enabling the…
No matter how fascinating and exotic other terrestrial planets are revealed to be, nothing generates more excitement than announcements regarding their habitability. From the observation of Mars to present-day efforts toward Venus and the…