Extremofilos

TURNING POINT Postdoc’s software code for imaging pays career dividends p.407

CAREERS
INTERVIEWS Narcissists are more likely to excel in job interviews, says study p.407

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springs; astronomers search for chemical signs of metabolism on other planets; and biologists investigate how life on Earth first appeared.Martins, for example, works in the department of Earth science and engineering, developing techniques for uncovering microbial life and metabolism in extreme settings, using soil samples from the Utah desert as stand-ins for samples from Mars. She collaborates with soil scientists, geochemists, biologists and robotics engineers who specialize in exploration. “That’s the beauty of the astrobiology field.It’s scientists from different research fields, working together,” she says. NASA has an annual conference dedicated to the field, which is taking place this week in Atlanta, Georgia.

ESA/DLR/FU BERLIN/G. NEUKUM

JOINT MISSIONS

Images from the surface of Mars: analysing these may form part of an astrobiologist’s role.

Alien encounters
Establishing a career in astrobiology is not alwayseasy. But keeping one’s options open can lead to work in this niche field.
BY NAOMI LUBICK

AST RO B IO LO GY

M

ichael Callahan knows that he has a great job every time a meteorite sample arrives at the laboratory from NASA’s meteorite archive in Houston, Texas. “There’s no cooler feeling than working with a meteorite in the lab,” he says. Callahan, an analytical chemist at theAstrobiology Analytical Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is one of a growing number of researchers around the world working in astrobiology — the exploration of how and where life might have emerged in the Universe. The breadth of astrobiology can be daunting. Because the field focuses on questions about the origins of life, it incorporates

aspects of astronomyand physics as well as chemistry, geology, oceanography, microbiology and bioinformatics. As a result, there are many different routes to a career in astrobiology; Callahan, for example, started out as an analytical chemist in industry. Exobiology — the study of the possibility of life on other planets — thrived with originsof-life research in the 1950s and ‘60s, and really took off with the spaceexploration programmes in the 1960s and ‘70s. Later, when the astrobiology label took hold, some people questioned the field’s seriousness, notes Zita Martins, an astrobiologist at Imperial College London. Many different types of researchers now contribute to the field; geomicrobiologists look for extremophiles — organisms that live in extreme environments such as deep caves or hot
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Support for astrobiology research is spread across many funding streams and disciplines, and finding funding and jobs that are strictly astrobiology-related is difficult, especially given recent budget woes. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) support the largest number of astrobiology-related positions, whether they are in Earth-scienceobservation or engineering jobs on the next space mission. But NASA is facing budget cuts that have alarmed researchers in the field. For 2012 and 2013, a slight increase in the budget for human space exploration, from US$3.7 billion to a proposed $3.9 billion, was countered by a decrease for the science directorate, including planetary-science research, from $5.1 billion to a proposed $4.9 billion. Theagency has withdrawn its component of the ExoMars programme — a joint mission with ESA to send an orbiter and rover to look for methane on the red planet, which is scheduled for 2018. NASA’s funding would have created more research positions for biologists and instrumentalists, among others. Although the US Terrestrial Planet Finder — a mission intended to look for Earth-sized planets in the...