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Aside from Earth, no planets in the solar system are known to harbor life. Mars, Europa, and Titan are considered to have once had or currently have conditions permitting the existence of life. Multiple rovers have been sent to Mars, while Europa Clipper is planned to reach Europa in 2030, and the Dragonfly space probe is planned to launch in 2027.
The ionizing radiation level at Europa's surface is equivalent to a daily dose of about 5.4 Sv (540 rem), [59] an amount that would cause severe illness or death in human beings exposed for a single Earth day (24 hours). [60] A Europan day is about 3.5 times as long as an Earth day. [61]
At least two-thirds of Mars' surface is more than 3.5 billion years old, and it could have been habitable 4.48 billion years ago, 500 million years before the earliest known Earth lifeforms; [4] Mars may thus hold the best record of the prebiotic conditions leading to life, even if life does not or has never existed there.
The rover, which has allowed scientists to explore whether Mars ever boasted conditions conducive to life, in 2014 made the first definitive detection of organic molecules, also in Gale crater ...
While Earth is the only place in the Universe known to harbor life, [10] [11] estimates of habitable zones around other stars, [12] [13] along with the discovery of thousands of exoplanets and new insights into the extreme habitats on Earth where organisms known as extremophiles live, suggest that there may be many more habitable places in the ...
Six spacecraft have visited Europa since it became one of the first moons found beyond Earth.. NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft flew by Jupiter in the early 1970s, but the first spacecraft to ...
To support an Earth-like atmosphere for about 4.6 billion years (Earth's current age), a moon with a Mars-like density is estimated to need at least 7% of Earth's mass. [20] One way to decrease loss from sputtering is for the moon to have a strong magnetic field of its own that can deflect stellar wind and radiation belts.
An artist's conception shows a terraformed Mars in four stages of development.. Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable for humans to live on.