Astrobiology 2018 Mission Definition
Astrobiology 2018 challenges:
Challenge 1: Understanding what is universally possible for life
Can we anticipate exotic metabolic pathways using unsupervised (non human bias) Machine Learning approaches with a view to determining the chemistry of a biosphere - and ultimately ecological signatures that my suggest life, but ‘not as we know it’?
Challenge 2: From biohints to confirmed evidence of life: possible metabolisms within extraterrestrial environmental substrates
Extraterrestrial environments may have coevolved a broad range of alternative life processes markedly different to those we observe on Earth. Can we deploy AI techniques to generate an extended parameter space for possible metabolisms based on given (observed) environmental conditions and substrates? AKA “biohints”