With a growing number of nations interested in planetary exploration, research and development of extraterrestrial rovers have been intensified. The usual practice is to test the performances of rovers on soil simulants on earth, prior to their deployment to extraterrestrial bodies. It is noted that in the tests the soil simulant is subject to the earth gravity, while the terrain on the extrate...

The lack of evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, even the simplest forms of animal life, makes it is difficult to decide whether the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is more a high-risk, high-payoff endeavor than a futile attempt. Here we insist that even if extraterrestrial civilizations do exist and communicate, the likelihood of detecting their signals cruciall...

I N T H E E F F O R T of devising ways and means of studying the existence of living organisms on other planets, attention must be focussed on microorganisms. This is not entirely due to professi,onal prejudice of microbiology, but is the consequence of accepted realization that microorganisms are responsible for the major amount of turnover of matter on earth and that life of the higher plants...

In this paper, a novel approach for the estimation of global solar irradiance is proposed based on a combination of empirical correlation and ant colony optimization. Empirical correlation has been used to estimate monthly average of daily global solar irradiance on a horizontal surface. The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm has been applied as a swarm-intelligence technique to tune the c...

The Open University's repository of research publications and other research outputs The combustion characteristics and stable carbon isotopic compositions of irradiated organic matter: implications for terrestrial and extraterrestrial sample analysis Conference Item (2005). The combustion characteristics and stable carbon isotopic compositions of irradiated organic matter: implications for ter...

How will humanity react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? Speculation on this topic abounds, but empirical research is practically non-existent. We report the results of three empirical studies assessing psychological reactions to the discovery of extraterrestrial life using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software. We examined language use in media coverage ...